I love Wordpress. It’s free and open-source. It’s fast and convenient. It’s written entirely in PHP, so I can modify anything I want. It can be up and running in under five minutes, tops. But, best of all, it works. It’s much more reliable than, say, blogger.

Wordpress 1.5 was a significant upgrade, and a lot of functionality was changed. This means that some of the old Wordpress 1.2 plugins no longer work without some effort. Because 1.5 is so new, I wasn’t always able to find the information I needed to quickly get things up and running. So, in the hope that this information might be helpful to others, here’s a quick rundown of the plugins I use on this weblog, and how I got them working (as best as I can remember, anyway).

The Amazon Media Manager hack for Wordpress 1.2 is fantastic. But it hasn’t been updated for 1.5, and I haven’t found any indication that it will be updated in the near future. Still, it doesn’t take too much effort to get it up and running. Begin by following these instructions. Actually, I believe you can ignore the first direction there, the one about changing the database connection string. If memory serves, that’s the way the code already looks.

Next, in amazonphp.php, change the line that reads:

require_once(’admin-header.php’);

to

require_once(’admin.php’);

Also, you’ll need to add this line to the first line of sidebar.php:

< ?php include('amazoninfo.php'); ?>

Finally, I think you put amazonphp.php in your the wp-admin directory, rather than in the directory specified in the instructions. It’s also possible that you’ll need to put it in the same directory as your theme files (index.php, sidebar.php, etc.). My notes aren’t entirely clear on this point, sorry.

And there you have it! Make those three simple changes, follow the instructions that came with the plugin, and you’ll have the Amazon Media Manager working with Wordpress 1.5. It won’t look perfect from within the dashboard, but it’ll work just fine.

Speaking of themes, there’s a lot of good ones out there. If you happen to settle on MinimaPlus, as I did, be aware that nicetitles may not work out of the box. But it’s a very simple fix. Just edit header.php, and change the line that points to “wp-content/themes/MinimaPlus/nicetitle.css” to point instead to “wordpress/wp-content/themes/MinimaPlus/nicetitle.css”. Do the same thing for nicetitle.js, on the next line down.

Next up: You really should get the Admin Bar plugin. This one works with 1.5 out of the box, and it makes working with your weblog much more convenient.

Comment spam is a fact of life. There are lots of approaches, but one simple way to trim it down is to close all comments on posts over, say, two weeks old. I mean, really, how many active comments are you getting on your posts from two months ago anyway? But comment spammers target the older posts, because it’s less likely that you’ll delete their spam there. So: you can use Auto-Shutoff comments to automatically close posts to comments once they reach a certain age.

Update: It turns out that the Auto-Shutoff Comments plugin only works erratically with Wordpress 1.5. But you can achieve the same effect with Spam Karma. Just check the boxes that say “don’t display the comment box on older posts” and “Delete comments that are submitted on older posts rather than moderate them”.

To get the Bastard Operator From Hell’s Excuse of the Day, as kindly provided by Eric Meyer, to display on my sidebar, I needed to republish Eric’s RSS feed. I first tried the Magpie RSS parser, but I quickly discovered that it had been integrated into Wordpress 1.5. I thought this was good, but it seems that, by default, Magpie is limited to the dashboard, and 1) a separate installation would therefore be difficult to get working and 2) altering the existing installation was also going to be difficult. Or maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing, so if you’re really interested in getting Magpie running on your server, take my comments here with a grain of salt.

Next, I tried rssLinkList, which worked like a charm except that it displays the title of each item in the feed and the link, but it does not display the content of the item. It is, in other words, a Link list, but I couldn’t get it to republish the entire RSS feed. After a couple of hours of hacking at it, I gave up.

(UPDATE: I received the following email from Bill Rawlinson, creator of rssLinkList:

I just wanted to let you know it can do quite a bit more than just show a list of titular links.

< ?php _rssLinkList(array("rss_feed_url"=>“http://www.auf-der-hoehe.de/index.php?id=23&type=333&feed_id=71&no_cache=1 “,
“num_items”=>10,
“show_description”=>true,
“random”=>true)); ?>

So it looks like that would have worked for me after all.)

All of this is to say: run, do not walk, and download the CG-PowerPack. It’s only an alpha release for 1.5, but it seems to work well enough. It includes the CG-FeedReader for parsing and republishing RSS feeds. It also includes an Amazon plugin, which I didn’t play with because I already had the Amazon Media Manager working. It’s also got a bunch of other plugins. All in all, it’s fantastic.

The final item of note: Tags4WP, which allows you to tag posts rather than categorize them. The difference? Categories, inconveniently, have to be defined in advance. It makes describing your posts a static, inorganic process. The “tags” concept, which you may recognize from flickr, is much more convenient and natural.

If somebody out there is working through installing these plugins and you need some help, leave a comment or send me an email (use the name I go by on this site followed by the domain name, with the appropriate punctuation in between) and I’ll be glad to help however I can.