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Posts tagged Custom Wordpress plugin

I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of sites lately. These include:

  • A new blog for Canadian DJ, JaBig.
  • Logo and design for NetAware Media.
  • Mike Arrington’s new podcast site TalkCrunch, and ongoing maintenance of his other Crunch sites.
  • A new site for Names@Work’s promotion of the new book Pulse – the site will be live soon.
  • A quick blog refresh for Help Lose Fat blog. In just four hours the blog was given a spruce up including a new header, installing a tonne of plugins, validating the code, and doing a quick general tidy-up.
  • Some design and templating work for Rate Wheels.
  • Blog redesign for Howard Lindzon (he’s still working on what’s going in those sidebars).
  • Outrageous Fortune (main site not yet live).

Auto links is an incredibly handy plugin which I came across recently and is now being used over at Names@Work.

If you’re find yourself linking to the same sites/areas of your site over and over in your posts, this plugin will save you time.

It will enable you to set up key words which will be automatically linked to the site/page you specify. It will also enable you to turn key words into Amazon searches (along with your associate ID). An incredibly handy feature is that you can track statistics on which links people are clicking on.

Names@Work is using this specifically to set up an internal glossary of SEO terms. Probloggers might find this useful for linking to sites/products they’re writing about often. You could even set it up to link to your blog’s search results for that term.

Auto links is a great example of a plugin which uses WordPress’ filter functionality. The plugin doesn’t actually alter the text of your posts in your database, it adds them just before displaying. So, if you turn off the plugin, your posts return to how you initially wrote them.

If a site you auto link to often changes its address, no need to search-and-replace all your old posts to fix the links: you’ll be able to change them all in one quick step. If you switch affiliates, that’s simple too.

Oh, and the support forum (while it looks quiet) is well-attended to by the plugin’s helpful author.

This semester I’ll be running a blog for two of my classes as a trial to see what the interest/value is like. It’s not research-driven but i probably will do some sort of evaluation and write-up of my thoughts on it.

I’m not too sure if anyone else has done one at Auckland University yet, but of course there are a tonne of educational blogs all over the globe. I’ve found it really tough to find good actual examples of lecturers blogging to/with their classes, so if you know of any, especially if it were for a statistics class, I would appreciate any links.

The blog is currently using a pretty quick and basic adaption of the Drunkey Love theme, along with a custom plugin to create an RSS feed from Invision Power Board v2.0.4 then display it with RSS Fetched Link List plugin. There’s also a simple events plugin which I hacked a bit since to display it how I wanted, plus some bug fixes. It’s also using the latest comments and Gravatar plugins.

I’ve now put up the code for the plugin used to create the TechCrunch Index.

Installation

  1. Check you have Ultimate Tag Warrior installed and activated
  2. Download the plugin and rename from cre8d_tags_in_columns.txt to cre8d_tags_in_columns.php
  3. Activate the plugin.
  4. Access the listing by including echo cre8d_UTW_TagArchive(); somewhere in your template. This will give, by default, 3 columns and tags grouped vertically in 5′s. If you wanted 2 columns and groups of ten, use: cre8d_UTW_TagArchive(2,10) and so forth.
  5. Add to your stylesheet the following:

    .list-column { float: left; width: 160px; margin: 0 5px; }
    .list-column ul { margin-left: 0; padding-left: 0; }
    .list-column ul li { list-style-type: none; }
    .spacer { margin-bottom: 20px; }

  6. Optionally tweak the width of .list-column to suit your blog’s layout. You may like to change the vertical spacing (.spacer) between groups too.

I’ve been an avid reader of TechCrunch for a while now and enjoy keeping abreast of new Web 2.0 products and news. I’m proud to say that the TechCrunch Index is now launched. It’s a great way to search for products and companies on TechCrunch and RSS feeds are available for each tag as well.

I will release the mini-plugin I created on top of the awesome Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to wp-plugins shortly. I’ll be working on some more projects for TechCrunch in the future and will let you know of new developments as they go live.

I thought I’d share a little plugin I’ve been using that I recently wrote, because I wasn’t happy with the default display of trackbacks in WordPress. If you have any problems, please let me know.

This plugin changes the display of trackbacks from:

[...] Trackback text [...]

to something a little more readable – I have it producing:

Trackback text …

but you could change the plugin code to suit your tastes, just change $pre and $post to what you’d like to appear before and after trackbacks.

Download
http://www.cre8d-design.com/code/rvc_trackback.txt

Installation
Rename the file to rvc_trackback.php
Drop the file rvc_trackback.php into /wp-content/plugins/
Activate the plugin in the Plugin Management

Changes
3 Jan 06: Version 1

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