bavatuesdays

I was thinking about this after publishing my last post, and without question I use one WordPress plugin far, far more than any other, namely the Wikipedia Link plugin by Andreas Krennmair. I has been a core plugin in my WordPress blogs for a relatively long time —I’d say about three years, or whenever WP 1.5 hit the internets. In all that time it hasn’t gone through any major overhauls because it is so beautifully simple. If you place any word or phrase within your posts or comments within two square brackets [ [Star Wars] ] (without the space between the brackets) it creates a direct link to the specified Wikipedia article. Now this may fail at times if a word or phrase has several articles that need some disambiguation, but it works a majority of the time for me.

We even played with this plugin a little bit at DTLT in order to see if we could have it link to articles (or even create new articles) within a MediaWiki install other than Wikipedia. All we did was change the base domain in the plugin from http://wikipedia.oreg/wiki/ to the domain of the other MediaWiki install, say http://jimgroom.org/bavawiki/ and it worked without a hitch. A very simple and powerful little plugin, one that I use so regularly that it has become such an integral part of my blogging that I don’t even think about it as a plugin, but rather a built in feature of the bava.