sw’as

Over the past few days I’ve installed a whole bunch (approximately three) of new WordPress plugins on this site.

The first plugin I installed was one to make the rel=”nofollow” go away. It is automatically inserted by WordPress in links in comments. There has been a little bit of discussion on the nofollow directive around the place lately and I’m siding with the dofollow camp. My reasons for siding with dofollow are explained much better by others around the place, including the authors of the various dofollow plugins that are available^[1]. I went with this one, for no particular reason. It does the job.

Then I installed the Live Comment Preview plugin by Jeff Minard & Iacovos Constantinou which was actually quite a hassle to get working. The plugin uses the ‘REQUEST_URI’ server variable in an if statement to insert the required JavaScript into your site. It took me ages to figure out why it wasn’t entering the relevant if statement and finally I found out it was because the PHP installation on my server doesn’t supply the ‘REQUEST_URI’ variable so I changed it to ‘PATH_TRANSLATED’ and away we went. It works beautifully.

The third plugin I in installed was the most excellent Subscribe to Comments plugin. Normally I wouldn’t expect anyone to bother subscribing to comments considering I get them only very occasionally. However, it should be useful for people who are using the Footnotes Plugin.

I also installed a fourth, the Official Comments plugin. It isn’t doing much yet, but it will. All of these plugins will come in handy when I do a site wide re-design planned for later in the year (after I finish uni - if only it would happen faster, with less effort required).

1. You can find at least three in the Comments section of the WordPress Plugin DB. [↩]