24
Aug
I’ve come across a few third-party WordPress plugins lately which I think deserve a place in the ArchivePress suite.
- Obviously FeedWordPress is at the heart of our plans. As well as pulling in posts from feeds, it also keeps a considerable amount of metadata about the original post, including the original author and URL.
- With the Academic Citations plugin you can add text citations in various common formats (Harvard, Chicago) to the foot of a post. Adding to or amending the formats available is trivial.
- Not entirely unrelated is the Dublin Core plugin adds some DC metadata in DC format to blog posts. By default it can include copyright and publisher information – particularly useful in an archive context.I haven’t checked this one out thoroughly yet – does it, for example, enrich feeds too? I imagine it’s readily hackable, anyway. Remembering my last post, in which I imagine a blog archive in the form of an EPrints repository, it’s clear how much semantic, micro-formatted, hyptertext richness an ArchivePress archive might offer its content, using plugins like this.
- The other plugin that looks particularly interesting is the Lucene-based search plugin, wpSearch. This looks like it could add a superior search experience over a large blog – or blog archive.
I’m not likely to resist the temptation to use them. In fact the citations plugin is already running on the AP1 demonstrator, and I have used it as the basis for a separate plugin also used there, which displays other metadata about the post. Who knows, maybe eventually it will look like an EPrints abstract page. I suppose I’m going to have to make some decisions!
August 25th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Richard,
We’re stumbling across the same plugins
I think we’re going to modify the Dublin Core plugin to add support for tags as dc:subject – it currently only supports categories. I wrote to the author about a few other suggested changes but realised they were all quite specific to JISCPress’ concept of a blog as a document rather than a series of articles.
wpSearch is nice. There’s a similar MU version that I think we’re going to use. Be aware that search in WordPress looks likely to change quite soon as a new search API plugin was recently announced and will end up in core before too long: http://andy.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/wordpress-search-plugin/
A while back I blogged about various plugins which add additional metadata to posts: http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/04/21/pimping-your-ride-on-the-semantic-web/
Maybe one or two might be useful to you, in particular the RDFa and OAI-ORE plugins.
Thanks for the link to the citations plugin. I hadn’t seen that. One of the problems you’re going to face is supporting various non-HTML elements that are used in blogs such as shortcodes. For example, if I embed a video using the shortcode [youtube lkhjsdfhd8] will ArchivePress be able to display the video? There are various plugins which people use to embed media in WordPress. Will you support them all?
Will ArchivePress support the various shortcodes/shortcuts that are used for other important academic writing conventions such as footnotes enclosed in double parentheses (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-footnotes/) or embedded LaTeX (http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/05/11/latex-support-in-wordpress/)
I’ve gone right off shortcodes recently as they create unnecessary dependencies in WordPress for just a small piece of convenience. I don’t think it’s worth the trade off.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Hi Joss. I’m sure your Tweets have led me to a few of them – thanks! There’s definitely an impressive suite of ideas out there for anyone wanting to roll out a rich scholarly blogging affair with WordPress.
I’ll have to check out the shortcodes issue – after all, they should be resolved and expanded by the time they hit the RSS feed, which we’re using as our source. (Same for any other blog platforms that have a similar approach.)
I imagine many of these plugins would benefit from more work to make sure the HTML they create is as richly semanticised and microformatted as possible. For example in your LaTex example the LaTex code is embedded in the image elements, which seems sensible.
August 25th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] lot about scholarly publishing on the web, and in particular with WordPress. This morning, I read a post over on the ArchivePress blog about some WordPress plugins which are useful additions to a [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
[...] lot about scholarly publishing on the web, and in particular with WordPress. This morning, I read a post over on the ArchivePress blog about some WordPress plugins which are useful additions to a [...]
August 28th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I wondered what the citations plugin might do to a post such as http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/ap1/?p=529 that actually includes references. Still can’t see it! Could you explain?
August 28th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Hi Chis
Sorry the citation bit’s a bit hidden at the bottom of the post – I will work on the theme to make it more prominent. It is not overwhelming, it just offers formatted inbound citations for readers to cut-and-paste when referencing the blog entry in the archive – not anything special for outward bound citations. The Metadata plugin does something similar but the format is tabular. Exactly how it’s displayed is moot – I could make it look like an EPrints abstract, or a BL catalogue entry, etc.
I think I need to get some examples up, even if they are just maquettes.
Once posts are in the blog archive, we can try doing clever things with any embedded references (like EPrints does with its “References” field) but the robustness of this will depend on the authoring tools at the original blog. If they start using clever microformatting, scholarly HTML and the like, then it gets interesting.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
If you want to see how references/citations might start being more embedded into web pages, including blog posts of course, have a look at the experiment Ed Summers has done with RDFa at http://inkdroid.org/journal/2009/09/10/documents/ and http://inkdroid.org/journal/2009/09/16/think-of-things/
October 7th, 2009 at 10:11 am
[...] this at the ArchivePress project today, with a list of useful plugins. Haven’t tried any of them, but there is a [...]
December 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Hi
FeedWordpress powers my aggregator on Digital Preservation.
I’ve been investigating plugin to build an aggregator and that one was by far the best.
AT some point I thought I’d use Drupal Aggregator, but it discards news older than 6 weeks (maximum) which doesn’t make it very relevant for me.
A new product called ManagingNews caught my attention, but failed to create categories…
But one of the feature I’d love to see in WP is geotagging: not as it is now but more as Managing News implemented it: an automatic extraction of locations form posts creating tags and a map.
That’s something I’d love.
SOme RSS feeds provide a location metadata but that’s the creator’s location, nothing to do with the content.
Do you think such a feature could belong to your pack?
Thanks