Here’s my list of a few premium WPMU plugins that have become an integral part of my WPMU install at iblog.stjschool.org.
- This year, new users did not have an active email account assigned to them from the division central office until the second week of school. This made signing up for a blog on Day 1 and retrieving passwords from email accounts – well – impossible. The Remove Email Verification from Sign-Up was a perfect solution. The hundreds of bounced message errors from the email server every day was an inconvenience, but at least every user was blogging.
- The Comment Indexer plugin is useful for two reasons. First, I now have a dynamic list of comments from the entire site on the front page of iblog.stjschool.org. Second, I’ve created a “SiteAdmin Sitewide Comments” page to be able to dig through all comments ever published. I’ve used it a couple times to track down a user leaving abusive/offensive comments.
- A somewhat related plugin is the Content Monitor. I get an email whenever a word defined by the “bad word list” appears in a post. It’s a plugin I wish I didn’t need, but it is nice to demonstrate its power now and again to refocus users on the School Internet Usage Policy.
- Finally, a new plugin I’ll use this year. If I wanted any post sitewide to remain “as-is” so a user can no longer edit it after a deadline I can enable the Lock Posts plugin. D’Arcy Norman at U of C has a plugin to display the post revisions “so students can’t sneak posts around submission deadlines by futzing around with the publish date.” Both plugins, like the Content Monitor above, shouldn’t be necessary in a perfect and honor-abiding blog site, but being able to freeze a blog to investigate academic penalty or to prevent “sneaks” altogether is powerful.
FYI: wpmu.org draw and plugin countdown
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