Netblog – Wordpress Plugin

About

Netblog is a tool that structures and connects dozens of posts within a Weblog. Its purpose is especially for larger Weblogs where, from my personal experiences, it is not quite convenient to jump directly between topic-related posts and websites without further search in categories, archives and tags. This takes time for your website’s visitor – it might not be even clear how to search for content-related posts. Of course, such links may be embedded within the main article, and this is still a good choice.

The goal is to enhance the navigation between posts and, as of version 1.1, even to an unlimited number of external resources like foreign websites, pdf-files etc. This plug-in uses AJAX to add links immediately to the post currently being edited, without reloading the edit page. Netblog features two widgets for Wordpress, named ‘References’ and ‘Further Reading’ by default with a couple of options to display the links for the visitor.

Download

Version	Release Date	Platform Wordpress 2.8 or later
Netblog 1.1	July 5, 2010

License

NetBlog by Benjamin Sommer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://netblog.benjaminsommer.com.

Only download and/or use this software, if you fully understand and accept this license.

Screenshots

Installing Netblog for Wordpress 2.8 or later

§ Download the latest stable version of Netblog from above.

§ Extract the archive to your Wordpress Plugins directory,
e.g. your_wordpress_install_dir/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/netblog

§ Login to your Wordpress Account – you need to have enough privileges to activate plug-ins.

§ Go to the Wordpress Plug-ins Panel. A list of all available plug-ins are being displayed.

§ Choose: Netblog > Activate.
DO NOT use ‘Network Activate’ for Wordpress 3.0!!!!

Installing Netblog for Wordpress 3.0

If you have enabled Wordpress Multisite, and if you are a super-admin, DO NOT choose ‘network activate’: at least on my installation, Wordpress wasn’t able to correctly install Netblog for all sites, i.e. Wordpress just installed the required database tables for the current site. To create all these database tables, Netblog still needs to be activated on each site manually. Of course, technically it is possible to set up a workaround, but Wordpress MU is quite a new feature and this problem in Wordpress will be fixed in due time. For now, just activate Netblog directly on each site (go to: Wordpress Admin > Plugins > Plugins > Netblog > Activate).

Known Bugs

Version 1.1

§ While typing in the auto-complete box on the edit-post page, pressing enter reloads the page, not adding the prior selected (via keyboard) auto-completed row/item.
Work around: type in the auto-complete box, and click with your mouse on one highlighted row.

Future Developments

§ Integrate trackbacks and pingbacks to automatically create new links to external resources.
“Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress sites they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks, no other action necessary.” (Wordpress.org)

§ Settings Page to tweek and adapt the work and the appearance of Netblog.

§ Netblog Visual – visualize the net of posts, pages and external resources, e.g. with Flash.

§ Make it possible to link to internal pages (Version 1.1 only links to internal posts, because posts need more structure and navigation, not pages usually)

§ Add a multi-user interface: as of Version 1.1, every user can add and remove as much links as wanted. Especially when a larger group works on a post, normal writers should not remove existing links, and they might just suggest new links which will be verified by an editor or above. It might be useful if each user can only add a limited number of links, depending on the privilege. Rules for each privilege and for each user may be defined.