New Blog Defaults Updated
I’ve had a couple of requests to update my New Blog Defaults plugin for WPMU. I finally got around to doing it. Here are the new features:
The ability to close comments on the first post and page.
The plugin has long had the ability to set the blog’s default comment status. But, because the about page and the hello world post are created before the New Blog Defaults code is run, those two items weren’t affected. I could have just checked to see if you have the default status set as closed, then those items should have a status that matches. But, ultimately, I like to make my plugins as flexible as possible. So, now you can control each of those settings yourself.
New Blog Defaults Close Comments Options
Adding User to Other Blogs
This request came from the BBPress world. If you have BBPress installed on a specific blog, you need everyone to be on that blog as a subscriber. While this plugin won’t go through your existing user list and add them to a blog, and it won’t add people that just sign up without creating a blog, it will add users that both sign up and create a blog to the blog or blogs of your choice. You can set the role you’d like them to have as well. Personally, I think this is probably better handled in a separate plugin that fires on user add – not on blog creation. But, it’s not difficult to add it here. And, it might be useful for those BuddyPress installs where people are limited to a single blog and always get a blog on signup.
New Blog Defaults Add User Options.
8 comments November 24, 2009
WPMU Plugin Stats Plugin Released
Best practice for upgrading plugins has always been to first deactivate the plugin, upgrade, and then reactivate the plugin. For site admins of WPMU sites, this is a laborious process, partly because you’d need to go through each blog to determine whether or not the plugin has been activated. This plugin provides a snapshot view of which blogs are using any particular plugin.
View of Admin Screen
For sites that are using Plugin Commander to manage plugins, additional columns for the Plugin Commander settings of Auto Activate and User Controlled are included.
View of Admin Screen with Plugin Commander Installed
For sites that are using Plugin Manager, additional columns for the Plugin Manager settings of Auto Activate, User Controlled and Supporter Controlled are included.
View of Admin Screen with Plugin Manager Installed
Data is regenerated on viewing the plugin stats page if the data is more than one hour old. Data can be regenerated anytime via the “Regenerate” button (as seen in the above screen shot).
Grab the code from wordpress.org. Enjoy!
Add comment November 16, 2009
WPMU Theme Usage Info Plugin
WPMU has two ways to activate themes – either sitewide, or on a blog-by-blog basis. But, there’s no convenient way built-in to know which themes are actually being used, or by whom. This plugin addresses that issue by creating a “Theme Usage Info” sub-menu of the Site Admin menu. Included on the page are two tables of data – one of themes currently being used, and one of themes not currently being used. The currently used themes table provides information on how many blogs are using the theme, which blogs are using it, and whether or not the theme is currently activated site-wide. The table of unused themes provides information on whether the theme is currently activated sitewide.
In addition, site admins can choose to provide this information to their users via a toggle on the administration page.
If enabled, users will be able to view data on theme usage in Appearance -> themes for every theme except the currently activated theme. A single line of text is added just before the activate link indicating how many blogs are currently using the theme:
When clicked, a scrolling list of themes is displayed in a thickbox:
Download the code from wpmudev.org.
Thanks go out to Ron and Andrea for their prior work in this area.
7 comments November 9, 2009
WPMU Dev
WPMU Dev is about to turn 100. That’s not years, that’s the count of useful doodads available to the WPMU community. I’ve got a few of my own over there, and they’ve been a great resource for all of us that are actively developing for WPMU. If you’re not familiar with them, be sure to check them out!
Add comment September 17, 2009
Google Maps Embed Plugin
I’ve released a new Google Maps Embed plugin for WPMU (and should work fine for WordPress as well). It uses the link generated by a Google map instead of the API key, for those users or those situations when using an API key is overkill.
Find it here: http://wpmudev.org/project/google-maps-embed
7 comments September 4, 2009
Two New Widgets Released
I threw a couple of new widgets out there for folks to have some fun with.
Featured Blog Tag Cloud and Shortcode
We use this one together with Donncha’s sitewide tags plugin, so we can have a tag cloud on your site’s home page that references the tags from the tags blog. The shortcode just allows you to pass in the ID of the blog you want, otherwise it acts pretty much just like the built-in shortcode, but with the defaults set a little differently – you can set the defaults directly in the code if you prefer different ones.
Featured Blog Widget
This widget lets you pick a featured blog and a featured author within that blog, and it will display the avatar of the featured author and a user-specified number of posts from the blog.
Both of these came out of the work that we were doing on an internal blog server – so they might be a tad bit customized in terms of layout. But, they’re good starting points if you need to do something similar.
20 comments August 25, 2009
Simple Dashboard Plugin Updated
1.3.2 release – It came to my attention that the core function get_blog_list does not include private blogs. So, I swapped out that code for a direct database call to get all blogs that aren’t spam, mature or deleted. I also streamlined the behind the scenes dashboard updates for a bit more efficiency.
Get the latest code over at http://wpmudev.org/project/simple-dashboard
2 comments July 28, 2009
