tag archive: wp plugins

I guess July is WordPress plugin month here at movingtofreedom.org, because here comes another one. This one was instigated by another Scott.

Scott Rosenberg wrote last week about the “mutability of online content” and the challenges news organizations face in handling changes and corrections to stories, and concluded that versioning made sense in journalism as a way to build trust. Readers can see all of the changes since publication so that there’s no sense of something being swept under the rug. The Drupal CMS has modules for making revisions publicly viewable, and of course this is a key feature of Wikipedia.

Scott noted that WordPress already stores revisions, and suggested a plugin could make old versions accessible to visitors. Looking to demo the idea on his blog, he later asked if any WordPress developers were intrigued. At first I was only intrigued enough to dig up an existing plugin by D’Arcy Norman that did some of what he was looking for: “Post Revision …

The French are a fine people, but you should be aware that this plugin has nothing to do with France or the French.

Month Grid Archive

I wanted to be able to display my monthly archives in a grid:

With post counts for each month, but wasn’t finding a plugin for it. I did find Rob Marsh’s Compact Archives plugin which gave me a good place to start from. (Thanks Rob!)

Along the way, it seemed like it would be nice to have post count totals for each year and a grand total. I think this table gives readers a nice snapshot of posting activity over the years.

It’s simple to use: put the_french_archives.php in your plugin dir, activate it, and put <?php month_grid_archive(); ?> in your theme file.

All Posts Archive

Inspired by the nice look of Leo Babauta’s Archives page, I also wanted to have an archives page to show all posts, like this:

…

This is a plugin/widget to show random quotes on your blog. Frank van den Brink originally created it and Christian Beer has also contributed. The wordpress.org homepage is here: Yet Another Random Quote.

I like this plugin, even if very few people around here can be bothered to actually click on a link to see my random quotes. Really, it’s okay. It’s just fine if you don’t give a rat’s ass about my collected pearls of wit, wisdom, and pop culture ephemera. (You probably won’t care to read my old YARQ post either.)

It appears that the plugin hasn’t been actively maintained, but through the miracle of free software I’ve been able to make my own fixes and enhancements, and now I can share them with you and the world. (I did get in contact with Christian, so we’ll see what we can do about updating the official plugin page.)

YARQ v3.0 works with WordPress 3.0 (for me, anyway), and I suspect will work with WP 2.5 …

WordPress is very good about supporting standards and producing valid markup, and at least when I started using it, it had a link in the standard theme to proclaim the validity of its pages and prove it to you by taking you to the W3C Markup Validation Service. A lot of people never pay this any attention and promptly produce a bunch of non-complying pages, all the while shamefully leaving the boastful link in the sidebar or footer of their site.

Being a retentive sort about many things, I’ve always worked to ensure my pages validate correctly, looking for the below highly satisfying message on each and every one of these posts that I strive mightily to create for you:

(Versus the alternative which is highlighted with red instead of green, and tells you that you are not just inadequate but are a bad person as well.)

But this can be a tedious chore. In order to validate by …

Updated, 11 July 2010: New YARQ post: WordPress Plugin, YARQ v3.0: Yet Another Random Quote. An updated and enhanced version compatible with WordPress 3.0. Includes the ability to edit quotes, among other cool things. Check it out!

I like quotes and excerpts. I’m not a big fan of the signature quote in emails and forums — it becomes repetitive to see the same pearls of wit and wisdom over and over and over again — but in general I like a good quote and have collected quite a few over the years.

(Skip ahead past techie background info to read about the exciting new MovingToFreedom.org site feature…)

I’d been thinking lately about adding some kind of random quote feature here, and this weekend after writing a couple of posts I needed something to prevent me from doing other pressing tasks, so I started toying around with the idea. I considered a custom PHP feature, and although it …

I added a comment preview feature, courtesy of Il Filosofo. Seems to be working great and wasn’t much trouble to get working. The only problem I’m seeing is that if I click on the W3C XHTML 1.0 link to validate the page, it complains that the page is not valid because no doctype is found. But there is a doctype, and if I view source and then manually paste that in to the W3C form, it validates fine. The only thing different from other pages I validate on here is that the url ends in .php. Does the validator make some kind of assumption when it sees that? My OCD will compel me to figure this out, but my ADD may allow me to wait until I attend to other things first.

Maybe this new feature will provide that added incentive you’ve been waiting for to chime in once in a while. You …

I’m trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service is very positive. The only problem I’ve had is that images don’t show up in the feed anymore, because I’m using relative paths and they need to be absolute. (That was most noticeable at first. I’ve since realized that internal links were broken also.)

I contacted FeedBurner support and I think Matt Shobe must have been responding to me even before I clicked the “submit” button, as if they have a support time machine to be extra responsive. He pointed out I should use absolute paths to fix that. But! But! That would be painful — …