WordPress Plugins
To be clear, I am no great php coder–I’m just too old to be a hotshot anymore. I use WordPress pretty extensively here at Idiomatrix as well as in my work, and I’ve taken advantage of many of the fine plugins that you can find at the WordPress plugin database.
Sometimes, however, I can’t find precisely what I need, and so, like anyone with common sense, I stand on the shoulders of giants and base my solutions on the work of others. Here are a few of the plugins I have written and/or modified for my use. I hope you may find them useful as well.
PageDate 2:
This plugin modifies the post date whenever a page is updated. WordPress supports changing a post’s modified date, but not for pages. HEAVILY based upon the work of Jerome Lavign, this version works with WordPress 2.0.x. I sent my changes to Jerome some time ago, but he’s very busy with other things, apparently. I could not have written this on my own, so Jerome essentially gets all the credit (unless it breaks, and then it’s probably my fault).
To install, just drop it in the plugins directory and activate in the plugins admin interface.
NOTE: I have just (Feb 22, 2007) received word that this isn’t working with the 2.1.x Wordpress family. Just as soon as I can find the time to install a 2.1.x rev somewhere, I’ll see about updating it. For now, this will only work with Wordpress versions 2.0 through 2.09.
SiteMaintenance:
When activated, this plugin blocks access to all of your public pages, while still allowing the administrator of the blog to do stuff on the backend. This is another instance where I have HEAVILY based the work on someone else’s, in this case on that of Angsuman Chakraborty.
To install, unzip the archive and drop the entire folder in your plugins directory, and activate it in the plugins admin interface.
There are a number of customizations available. Open the ‘message.php’ file, and you can change the number of minutes you anticipate that your blog will be down, as well as inserting an optional email address for your users to contact you if there are extended problems.
Anyone with any knowledge of CSS and html can make additional modifications to the message.php file to suit their needs.