Thread: Plug-ins incorporated!

Plug-ins are a great way to extend the functionality of anything. be it your desktop application, a device hardware or even a CMS. One of the major reasons the open source CMSs became popular was their capability of being extended effortlessly and without any programming knowledge, just by using plug-ins. Allow me to list the most important ones here and also mention why we installed them.

Advanced Excerpt: This plug-in extends the functionality of the default wp_excerptO function by allowing you to specify the charactedength for the excerpts and also the addition of HTML markups.

CommentLuv: This plug-in has been used to show a link to the last post from the commenters' blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. This was what we came up with when we wondered what more could be offered to a commenter!

Editor Extender: Despite the default TinyMCE editor of WordPress being pretty featurerich, it lacked the capability to create tables. This was achieved by 'extending' the functionality of WordPress' default editor using this plug-in.

Live Comment Preview: A lot of us use HTML tags while commenting on a blog and more often than not end up using the preview feature just to make sure the comment looks the way we want it to. Well, we just made life easier for you and provided you with a live preview of whatever you want to write to us about. Happy commenting! Most Commented: We have three tabs at the sidebar, one of which sorts the articles on the basis of the number of comments received. This helps in featuring popular content on every single page of the site, inspiring our authors to come up with better content, every time!

Search Everything: Previously, our search algorithm would search only the tags and words in the articles, but neither the excerpts nor the categories that an article had been classified into, which was achieved by installing this plug-in.

WordPress Related Posts: As already mentioned, it was an important requirement from our side to be able to feature articles related to those you read on the site. Hence the plug-in.

WP Ajax Edit Comments: This allows both the admins and users to edit the comments inJine. It also allows the admins to edit every single comment on the website.

Flexo Archives: We wanted to sort the articles in our Archives' page according to the year they were published. Moreover, we also plan to feature content on the site that has never been published in the magazine, and did not want such articles to be featured in the archives section. Plus, despite none of us being experts in JavaScript, we wanted the pull down functionality in our archives page, and hence ended up using the Flexo Archives Plug-in.