Image credit: darek.zon’s “Blue Sky”
Yesterday UMW Blogs was upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (3.2.1), and it was surprisingly seamless. Why surprising? Well, we hadn’t updated since December 2010 and we had more that 69 plugins and themes that were waiting to be upgraded over the last few months, and I thought this would be the time when we finally paid for our sin of theme and plugin gluttony. But, we didn’t—so far we’ve escaped relatively unscathed and laid a couple of  workhorse plugins over the years to rest, a couple of which had far outlived their time. Here is the shortlist of mu-plugins we killed (I will be posting the longer list of plugins and themes we let go as we continue the culling process all this week and next). It is WordPress time at DTLT!
Userthemes is gone. When dsader created Userthemes it was the only way to edit and customize individual themes on a WPMu install without manually copying and re-creating existing themes and then add custom hacks. With the 3.2.1 WP Multi-Site setup this is built into the network admin space. I am loving the uber admin network center.
Anarchy Media Player has been retired. It pained me to do it, but we had to. The instances of AMP shortcode still needs to be converted throughout the site to convert YouTube embeds (working on that) but in the meantime this plugin was a drag on the system and hadn’t been updated since 2008—kinda surprised it worked for so long after it was killed. My very special zombie plugin. And still haven’t found a media plugin as versatile, but with embedding YouTUbe videos in WP as easy as copying and pasting a URl in the visual editor, how could I rationalize this plugin anymore?
MU Multi-Site Manager has also been retired, and I am sad to see it go. This is the pluginw e used to get Longwood Blogs, Faculty Academy, and other WPMu sites that were hosted within UMW Blogs. Interestingly enough, deleting the plugin doesn’t effect the existing networks within networks at all. This week I will be experimenting with James John Jacoby’s Multi-Network plugin as a replacement. And I am planning on testing it as I try and bring the precursor to UMW Blogs (ELS Blogs) into the UMW Blogs fold.
Akismet was also retired on UMW Blogs, but that had nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with money. They wanted $750 a month for a site as big and active as UMW Blogs and we just couldn’t afford it (more details in my previous post here) so we are going with TypePad AntisSpam, so far so good. And I will be crossing my fingers because without a good spam filter we are kinda finished.
Finally, anyone have any recommendations for plugins that they love and think we should play around with in UWm Blogs?
Thanks to Chris’s comment here, Viper’s Quicktag Plugin is installed sitwewide on UMW Blogs, and has put automatically fixed the shortcode for all the Anarchy Media Player YouTube videos we amassed over the years. So awesome, I love comments 🙂