Developing OTFA

One of the ever-expanding questions about the Multi-user version of WordPress is, what plugins actually work? Well, we have been road-testing a number and we’ve had the joy of instant portability (Lighter Admin Drop Menus: though we could do with some of those natty icons for the Mu-specific admin items) and the frustration of instant fatal errors. But to the list, and our criteria here is that the plug-in works as we expect for each individual blog (well it would have to be wouldn’t it). If we have had weird behaviours, we’ve checked the db and more often than not, the plugin has installed outside of the MU hierarchy of tables.

• Aggr.
• Akismet.
• All-in-One-SEO.
• Collapsing Category Menus
• Collapsing Page Menus
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Dashbar - and we have customised it and it still works!
• Event Calendar - though we’re still not really sure about this one, and think we might set up a blog for it all on its own …
• Exec-PHP
• Lighter Admin Drop Menus - the lighter way to blog
• Simple Forum — Well, this worked and was great, but then we integrated bbPress and it became redundant.
• SmartRSS — Good grief Charlie Brown! We could populate the world with blog entries with this one!

And plugins which ain’t (or don’t seem to be) MU friendly:

• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form — It is a great plug-in and we wanted to use it, but haven’t the nouse to get around the fatal error it causes. Ho-hum.
• Slim Stats — wants to do everything, but records nuffin. sheesh.
• Userextra — won’t play, more’s the pity because it would have been an easy way to make private forums for groups of users ….

Then of course there is the matter of bbPress and its integration with WPMU – we had it up and running within in half an hour. The only wrinkle was permalinks which completely wonked out and made running the forum on the url forum.forargyll.com a nightmare. Basically, anything other than the home page ended up at the 404 error page on the For Argyll site. So we went to a date specific post hierarchy where forargyll.com/forum can be nothing else other than a forum, and we have had to utilise the nasty /?thread=12 form.

This list is not finished and we’ve had some really interesting other bits which when resolved we’ll add.