What Makes This Blog Tick?
by David Bradley
This article is very much for Sciencebase readers who'd like to take a look under the hood. Obviously, the site is running on Wordpress the CMS/blogging software, although there are a few static legacy pages that lie outside the site's WP heirarchy, indeed, this page is not part of the WP database.
Anyway, for those who like to know such things, at the time of writing (November 2007), there were 18 active plugins running on Sciencebase and 4 inactive plugins. The inactive plugins are activated periodically for specific tasks such as carrying out search & replace functions, or displaying popular pages in the database.
I've removed the version numbers for clarity, but you can display them with a mouseover the plugin name. NB These were the versions running at the time of writing, they will most likely have been upgraded by now.
There are a couple of hidden proprietary plugins that do special stuff for the site but I won't bore you with those. However, you may also like to know that to generate this page, I used the WP Plugins Used plugin from Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan, although once I'd created this page, that plugin became redundant and so I deactivated and uninstalled it, and it's not listed below. Due credit to Lester for a neat Wordpress tool though, be sure to check out his other plugins, he has produced many.
Active Plugins
Akismet
> Matt Mullenweg
Antispam filter for comments.
Contextual Related Posts
> WebLogToolsCollection
Displays related posts at the end of any particular post.
Fancy Pullquotes
> Giorgio Gilestro
Creates
magazine-type pullquotes of specific text.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
> FeedBurner
Detects calls for the site's feed and redirects it to FeedBurner to give readers
more and clearer options for subscribing to the
Sciencebase newsfeed.
Get Recent Comments
> Krischan Jodies
Display the most recent comments in the sidebar.
Head META Description
> Kaf Oseo
Inserts
the meta description tag into each post or page. Useful for telling the search
engines about site content.
inlineRSS
> Cal Demaine
Allows an RSS feed to be displayed within a page or post.
Landing sites
> The
Undersigned
When
you visit the site from a site from a search engine, this plugin shows you
additional posts related to your search terms.
Random Posts
> Scott Merrill
Displays random posts
Related Posts
> Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.
Reverse Order Comments
> Tim Zylinski
Puts comments in the more logical reverse chronological order, so that the most
recent is at the top.
ShareThis
>
Alex King
Let you
add a post to your social bookmarks or e-mail it to a friend.
Show Top Commentators
> Nate Sanden
Rewards readers for contributing site feedback. The more comments you leave, the
more chance you have of getting a link.
SRG Clean Archives
> Shawn Grimes, Sebastian Schmieg
A nice uniform way to display your archives.
Subscribe To Comments
> Mark Jaquith
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an
entry.
the_excerpt Reloaded
> Kaf Oseo
This mod of WordPress' template function the_excerpt()
allows me to display the most recent post on the homepage in full.
Top Posts By Category
> M&M
Displays Top Posts By Category.
wp-recent-links
> Markku Seguerra
The mini-blog behind
Geeky Bits.
Inactive Plugins
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (drop-down)
> AddThis.com
I tested this as an alternative to ShareThis.
Odiogo Listen Button
> Odiogo
The Sciencebase podcast has almost 1000 subscribers, but not many people (about
3 a day), use the listen now button, so it's currently disabled.
Popularity Contest
> Alex King
This
ranks posts by popularity.
Search and Replace
> Mark Cunningham
Lets me do simple search and replaces in the WP SQL database.
Sciencebase FAQ
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