I’ve been through so many iterations of WordPress themes, and have been fairly disappointed by the lack of basic features that help users and developers alike get around WordPress’ lack of well-rounded customization of output. Two things that are lacking:
- A simplistic way to add related links to external sites.
- Displaying authors without having to resort to and be constrained by WordPress users
WordPress used to have a separate feature for adding and managing links, but it has since been removed somewhere in the later versions of 3.x. It is now merged with posts, and to be used as a post format type. It makes sense as to why the developers of WordPress did this, so that content management was more streamlined, and I fully support that, but either I don’t understand how to manage links in a post derived from other posts that are designated as link formats, or this wasn’t a well thought out application change.
Either way, I decided to build my own plugin for managing and maintaining links at the post level, using an admin metabox. The plugin is called CJ Related Links, and it simply uses it’s own database table, to store information about a links label (as it is displayed in the content), and its URL. Links can be added, updated, or removed, as well as reordered using WordPress’ native jQuery sortable feature. A sidebar widget is added to the WordPress instance, that will list out all links provided to a post.
Another plugin I created is called, CJ Authorship. This plugin allows users to provide a custom author instance, which would include author’s full name, and a brief description. Currently, only the full name field is displayed on the front-end in place of the the_author filter as an inline list. If there is more than one author the list is delimited by ‘and’. There are plans to customize this more, and provide and output for the author description in later releases.
These plugins are open-source licensed, and the source code is available publicly on UCI’s Strategic Communications BitBucket account (CJ Related Links; CJ Authorship). Feel free to contribute to these plugins, or make some suggestions!