New WordPress plugin: Sitewide Tag Suggestion

WordPress’s Post Tags box, which appears on each Edit Post and Add New Post screen, has a great feature called “Choose from the most used tags in Post Tags”. This link allows you to see which tags you’ve used frequently in the past and apply them to your current blog post. The feature gives rise to two nice effects. One is that you avoid ending up with a lot of close-but-not-quite-identical tags on your blog (like “WordPress”, “WP”, “Word Press”, and so on) that, because they aren’t grouped together, tend to defeat the organizing purpose of tags. Another benefit is that it reminds you of the things you found important in past posts, and encourages you to mark your current post with the same tags, if relevant.

Sitewide Tag Suggestion
Sitewide Tag Suggestion

This plugin (and set of hacks) that I’m calling Sitewide Tag Suggestion allows you to glean the same benefits from the tag collection not just of a single blog, but of all the blogs on a WPMU installation. In short: STS adds another link to the Post Tags box, this one allowing authors choose from the entire community’s most popular tags when composing a post.

If you’ve got a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons, you can take advantage of Sitewide Tag Suggestion today. Just check out the Post Tags box when you’re writing a blog entry.

You can download the plugin here: sitewide-tag-suggestion.php.zip.

Detailed instructions for installation – which, partially as a result of my own ineptitude, involves a few hacks to WPMU’s core code – are contained inside of the file. Please note that WPMU 2.8+ is required, as is Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin.

New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets

BuddyPress comes with several WordPress widgets, among which are the Groups and Members widgets that you see on the CUNY Academic Commons home page. This plugin makes those widgets a little more customizable, allowing users to specify which of the three tabs (Newest, Active, or Popular) they’d like to be each widget’s default view.

enhanced-bp-widget

If you’ve got a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons, you can start using this feature right away. Just look in Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets. Be sure to select the Groups/Members widgets whose descriptions say “Enhanced”.

You can download the plugin for use on your own installation of WPMU/BP here: enhanced-buddypress-widgets. It’s also available from the WordPress plugin database: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-buddypress-widgets/.

New BuddyPress plugin: Remove Previous Comment Edits From BuddyPress Activity

UPDATE: BP Dev Andy writes in a comment to this post that this bug will be fixed in BP core soon. If you’re running a recent version of BP, it’s likely that you won’t need this plugin. Please make sure you can reproduce the issue before installing.

This plugin fixes a small but potentially annoying quirk in BuddyPress. If you, as a blog owner, edit a comment that appears on your blog, BuddyPress adds an entry to the sitewide and individual activity streams – but it doesn’t delete the old entries. As a result, if you end up (for example) editing your own comment a few times in a row, you’ll see multiple items on the activity feed.

This plugin fixes the problem by checking whether a submitted comment is an edit, and if it is, by deleting previous versions of the comment in the activity stream.

Until the plugin is in the WordPress repository, I’ve made it available in a zip file here. Just load bp-activity-skip-comment-edits.php into your /wp-content/plugins folder, activate in Dashboard > Plugins (sitewide, if you’d like), and you should be good to go.

New MediaWiki extension: BuddyPressActivity

One of the most interesting vantage points from which to monitor goings-on around the CUNY Academic Commons is the BuddyPress activity feed. The sitewide feed – located on the Commons’s News page – lists all the activity happening the blogs, groups, and profiles around the site. There are activity streams for individual users and for those users’ friends as well – you can mine, for instance, here.

wiki-activity

Until recently, though, these streams did not include information the activity taking place in the wiki portion of the site. I’ve developed a extension for MediaWiki (the software that powers the Wiki section of the Commons) called BuddyPressActivity that rectifies this shortcoming. For websites – like the CUNY Academic Commons – that have integrated our homegrown MediaWiki/Wordpress MU integration, this extension will update BuddyPress activity streams to include edits to pages within the wiki, thus better reflecting the extent and variety of the action on the site.

You can find out more about the extension – and download the code for use on your own MW/WMPu installation – at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BuddyPressActivity.