Exploring a few WPMU plugins

I recently got inspired, so I returned to the ELS blogs site to see what was going on in the world of WordPress Multi-User plugins (as well as to test Simple Pie on WPMU -which works beautifully!). I’m glad I did!

I found a few cool new plugins for WPMU, and I will order them in the order of overall coolness (the coolest comes first). All of these plugins can be downloaded on the WPMU development site here.

  • The Anarchy Media Player Plugin (love the name!): WPMU now has an all-in-one multi-media player thanks to the Anarchy Media Plugin. Stop and think about this for a moment, WP has another plugin as versatile and well designed as PodPress. That’s two bad ass multi-media plugins while Drupal is still trying to put one half-way decent module together -what’s wrong here?
    Here are the file formats and online services this plugin supports:

    Simple href links: Upload your mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, wmv, avi or asf file via the WordPress editor’s upload browser then “send to editor” – or make a hypertext link to any external file on the web – and you’re done!

    Rich text editor: Flash swf (including Google Video, YouTube etc., players via the “A” for anarchy button) or Director dcr use the respective rich editor buttons. To embed the various media players supported by AMP enter the full HTTP address (url) to your YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace or GoEar web page. For DailyMotion video and Apple iTunes iMixes just copy and paste the code from their embeddable players.

    A very cool development to say the least!

  • The WPMU Plugin Manager: A close number two if you have anything at all to do with administering a WPMU install. This plugin rocks! Here’s the official copy: “Manage global plugin policies or just turn on and off plugins for individual blogs – without enabing like the plugin backend menu.” I can’t begin to stress how amazing this is for customizing users on a case-by-case, or class-by-class, basis. I just installed it and updated all the blogs on the site with Spam Karma 2 -won’t they love me without ever knowing why! Here’s a looksie:MU Plugin Manager
  • WPMU Recent Posts: “Adds a sidebar widget to let you display recent posts from updated blogs in WordPressMU. The posts from blogs marked as spam, mature, or deleted will not be listed. Download from the topmost link .” Relatively straightforward -but always useful to catch a quick glimpse of what’s most recent on the home page. It supposedly creates a sidebar widget, but I couldn’t get that to work too well, I had to copy and paste a php snippet in the sidebar widgets. So, not too well coded, but easy enough to work around with a slick K2 sidbar modules them:)
  • Mass Mailer: A straightforward plugin (works better than the previous plugin out of the box, but since it has to do with e-mail I had to rank it down a peg) that allows the administrator to e-mail everyone who has a blog on the site. This will be useful, for example, if I want to send a link to a post about exporting their content as they are getting ready to graduate, or details about new plugins, etc. I imagine I won’t use it much, but a nice fiver in my pocket regardless.
  • WPMU Latex Math & Random Blog: These two plugins tie for last because neither worked correctly for me. The Random blog plugin is a nice idea (have a link on the portal that features a random blog in the network) but it was terribly coded and continually chokes on the headers. I’m gonna have to re-visit this one. WPMU Latex is a bummer because I know it works (I saw it on uniblogs.org), so I am going to have to revisit it sometime soon as well. I just love the idea of folks putting complex mathematical equations into a blog or wiki (MediaWiki is Latex ready but I have seldom seen it used) -so I will have to do more research on this one.
  • I do love playing with WordPress Multi-User -I guess I am a WordPress fan boy:)

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4 Responses to Exploring a few WPMU plugins

  1. gardo says:

    Rock on. Drupal, the gauntlet is down!

  2. Matt says:

    Terrific stuff, Jim — the Anarchy plugin is going to be especially helpful. I had considered abandoning WPMU because of the problems involved in posting videos. It’s very nice to know that there is a solution out there. Thanks for posting about this.

  3. jimgroom says:

    That is really good to hear, Matt. In fact, I think I saw a message on the WPMU forums from you about embedding video in posts. I’ll have you know, this spurred me on with by experiments -keeping you interested is part of why I do all this 🙂

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