Alex King’s Articles Plugin for WordPress

If you haven’t already, go check out Alex King’s post about the plugins he is employing for the redevelopment of his WordPress site. He has produced some unbelievably cool functionality for WordPress, and the community owes him much.

I took four plugins from the post referenced above:

• the 404 Notifier (a feed for page errors on your blog)
• the WordPress Mobile Edition (a theme for PDAs)
• Share This (an ajax enabled link for sharing posts through web 2.0 services or e-mail)
• The Articles plugin allows you to define certain blog posts that you want to re-index on a static page.

You can download any of these plugins and more here. All of the plugins are worth exploring, but I was particuarly struck by the last one I mentioned. The Articles plugin allows you to define certain blog posts that you want to re-index on a static page that cross-references these posts using the category tags you assign to each. I tried a little experiment by selecting four posts I had published over the last few months that were a bit more involved and defined them as articles. I then took the code provided by the Articles plugin and slapped it in a static page (using the Exec-PHP plugin that makes it easy) and, lo and behold, the bavarticles page has one column (you can also have two columns if you choose) of category tags beneath which are lists of titled links to the “articles.” You can also put the code that calls articles in your blog’s sidebar(s). Not only is this an intuitive way to index posts across several category tags outside of the blog’s inverted chronology, but it also allows you to cull certain posts from the blog to use as articles by defining a taxonomy accordingly. I use the term taxonomy here with Drupal in mind, for the Articles plugin for WordPress begins to build in some of the functionality of taxonomies and vocabularies (on a more limited scale) that makes Drupal such a powerful CMS for organizing conent along several different axes.