Flashback to ... 17 years ago ... and probably eatlier. When I originally put them up on PB Wiki I wrote "I am not even sure if I would be of any use these days as I have stopped following WordPress development a long time ago." on the wiki page. These must be quite a bit older than 17 years. These WordPress plugins were created in the REALLY REALLY EARLY days of WordPress.
I put these files on PB Wiki on March 22, 2006 ... which was some time after I "stopped following WP development" and haven't updated the wiki since May 11, 2015. 😆
- delicous cached
- Related Entries
- Grid Magazine Plugins
- Random Posts and Random Excerpts
- Random WittyText
In the plugin section below I am, for the most part, just pasting what I wrote on the wiki so many years ago. Nostalgia is a bitch, plus looking back at these 14 years later is really funny. I put my today's thoughts in quotes.
A show of hands of people who actually remember del.icio.us?
🦗
I thought so.
del.icio.us is a great online social bookmarking service that lets you save and share your bookmarks online. This plugin is a quick and friendly way to integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into your WordPress site. It is based on an another WordPress plugin that had a couple of issues:
It desperately needed a caching mechanism to avoid 503 errors when del.icio.us site was down and to avoid taxing del.icio.us servers with multiple requests. The original author had not plans on developing the plugin any further.
- Download the zip file.
- Extract to a location of your choice.
- Upload delicious.php to your WordPress plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/).
- Enable the plugin.
- Place the following code anywhere in your template replacing "username" with your del.icio.us username.
delicious('username');
del.icio.us linkrolls quietly made this plugin obsolete hence the reason why I have pretty much discontinued any further development of it. However, you may still use it if you wish.
My pride and joy, and testament to me not seeing what these ultimatelt became over the years and how imprtant these types of widgets are for SEO to this day.
This plugin will output a series of "related" entries based on keyword matching.
- Download the latest version.
- Upload the plugin file (related-posts.php) to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.
- You will notice a "Related Posts Options" tab under your "Plugins" tab. If this is your first time installing this plugin please click the link for index table setup script at the bottom of the options page. You only need to do this once when you install the plugin for the first time. If automatic setup fails (can happen and may not even be my fault) read on ...
- If automatic creation of a full text index fails. You will have to set it up manually. Don't worry it's not hard. Just open your database in phpMySQLadmin and run the following command (cut & paste):
ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT post_related (
post_name ,
post_content
)
Note: You may have to change wp_posts to something else if you are using a different prefix, which is common when you have multiple WP installs running of the same database.
The plugin is called using:
related_posts();
Starting with version 2.0 you can just use the options page to customize the look and output. However you can use the following guide to edit the paremeters manually if you wish.
related_posts($limit, $len, '$before_title', '$after_title', '$before_post', '$after_post', $show_pass_post, $show_excerpt);
Where:
$limit - No. of related entries to display. (Defaut: 5)
$len - Desired excerpt length (no. of words). (Default: 10)
$before/after_title - Text to insert before/after the title section.
$before/after_post - Text to insert before/after the post exceprt section, if displayed.
$show_pass_post - Toggle show/hide password protected posts. (Default: False)
$show_excerpt - Toggle show/hide excerpts. (Default: False)
Example:
related_posts(5, 10, '< li >', '< /li >', , , false, false);
Mike extended the plugin to allow manual correlation of entries using keywords. This is especially useful in situations where post title may have little to do with the post's actual content.
Keywords are specified by placing into your article. The plugin will store these keywords into a custom field and use them instead of the post title to find possible related entries.
There is a version that allows to use the built in excerpt field as opposed to the autogenerated one. Just download the appropriate version if you wish to do so.
This is an extension of the original plugin to make your 404 error page useful.
This plugin will only work if you had/have a permalink schema with the post titles in it. For example, /archives/2006/01/02/post-title or similar. In that case the plugin will strip out everything but the post title and use it to find entries that may be related to what the user may be looking for. I have it running on this site and it seems to be working reasonably well ... regex is a bit iffy but it seems to strip out most rubbish that people may type into URLs.
I tried doing a is_404 check, but it kept borking on me for some reason. So I just stuck in an extra function related_posts_404() that should be inserted into your 404 page (404 template in the theme you are using NOT a regular 404 page).web hosting
Ideally, the plugin should also be able to grab link text or search terms and use them to find possibly related entries to list on your 404. This is something that will help with SEO and I would like to implement in the future. While using search terms makes sense link text doesn’t because people often use “link”, “via” etc.
Download and follow the regular installation instructions. The options page is global and will be used for the main plugin and this 404 extension.
related_posts_404();
Grid Magazine was an indie music publication that, unfortunately, went the way of the dodo. grid’s back issues are still an interesting read for anyone with an interest in music.
While helping DJ Blurb, Dooce's husband, to get my plugins working on his site I ended up throwing together a couple of plugins for Grid Magazine's specific needs. However, I decided to share them with the public in case someone wanted to use them.
There is no proper documentation for any one of these plugins so you will have to sift through the code yourself. Luckly, everything is rather simple.
This plugin is basically a simplified version of the Related Entries plugin without the keyword matching. nstead, it lists any number of related entries that are in the same category and month as the one being viewed.
This plugin was designed to show the magazine cover depending on which article you are reading. For example, if you are reading an article from the September issue, it will show September's cover in the sidebar. This works both in individual entry and monthly archive views. The solution is crude and is highly specific to Grid Magazine's file naming schema, but some of you may still find it useful.
Both of these are pillars of simplicity. One will pull up a list of random posts and the other a list of random excerpts. Random excerpts is aimed at photobloggers who post photo thumbnails into the excerpt field.
- Download and extract.
- Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Enable the plugin.
- The plugins are called using:
random_posts($limit, $len, $before_title, $after_title, $before_post, $after_post, $show_pass_post, $show_excerpt);
or
random_excerpt($limit, $len, $before_title, $after_title, $before_post, $after_post, $show_pass_post, $show_excerpt);
Where:
$limit - No. of posts to show.
$len - Lenght of the auto-generated excerpt.
$before_title - Text to appear before the entry title.
$after_title - Text to appear after the entry title.
$before_post - Text to appear before the entry excerpt.
$after_post - Text to appear after the entry excerpt.
$show_pass_post = Include/exclude password protected entries (Default: false).
$show_excerpt = Show/hide excerpt (Default: false).
Note! This page is about Witty Text, however WP Quotes is a more sophisticated plugin that uses stores the quotes in your SQL database, has a sexy interface for adding quotes and can do more overall.
This is probably the simplest WordPress plugin there is in existence. I could be wrong, of course. This simple plugin will fetch a random quote from a text file and display it pretty much anywhere on your WordPress site.
- Download and extract.
- Upload witty.php to /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Edit/insert your own quotes into witty.txt and upload it to /wp-content/. Every new line in witty.txt is a new quote … check the included file to see what it should look like. FYI, if you chmod 666 witty.txt after uploading it you will be able to edit it from within WP interface later. You can put witty.txt anywhere on your site, but you will have to edit plugin code accordingly.
- Enable the plugin.
- The plugin is called using:
<?php witty(); ?>
Although the plugin doesn't support multiple quote files, this limitation is very easy to get around although it will require you to manually edit the plugin.
- Create a copy of the plugin w/ a slightly different name. For example, witty2.txt.
- Change the function name to witty2 or similar, so that it makes sense.
- Change the name of the text file it calls, witty2.txt seems like a good idea ...
- Voila, you now have a second text file of witty quotes you can call using a separate funtion. Activate the plugin, populate the file with infinite wizdom and you should be all set.
Adding multiple file support would be easy, but that would be overkill for this plugin in that case it would be better to use a SQL database, which was already done.