An interesting post by Chris Pirillo

• I’d also like to see a similar WP plugin for Bookmarking the post in the multitude of social engines (on hover, add to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc.). I don’t wanna clutter my posts with hundreds of icons, and I believe this is plugin is also within the realm of possibility.

There are plenty of solutions to this, I will probably do a roundup over on Andybeard.eu soon. None are complete solutions, but that isn’t necessarily the plugin author’s fault.

• What about a plugin that takes incoming search terms and auto-tags the post based on those terms (with or without moderation)? So, if a user searches for KeywordXYZ on Google and ultimately visits one of the blog entries, that blog entry will have the KeywordXYZ added to its tag list (via UTW or something).
• I also need a WP tool that recursively goes through my posts which have not already been tagged, then tag the posts with keywords it finds most appropriate (either through the Yahoo! API or internal logic) - almost like how the Related Posts plugin works against the posts database automatically?

The Yahoo API has some limitations. Using UTWs interface atm, quite often you will receive an error stating that a post was too long for the API to handle.

A good way of handling auto tagging (with a plugin) is using Sean’s alinks plugin. It can also be achieved by using a specialised desktop application for blogging.

Using search for tags is hazardous, as half the terms are long tail.

I have constant problems with plugins that hook into all my pages.

Whilst some plugin authors have attempted to add some level of “selectivity” to their plugins, so that the plugins only hook into certain types of posts, or certain page slugs, it rarely works on all pages.

Thus you end up switching off all automatic hooks, and placing the function calls manually in each template.

Is there a need for some kind of universal plugin or feature in the core that can be used by all plugin authors to control exactly which pages or posts a plugin is allowed to hook into?

The ultimate aim would be to have a system such that you can switch theme, and not have to make 100s of modifications to your template for simple plugins for bookmarking etc.

Maybe implement it just as a barrier. Have an interface of active plugins, and currently template files, and allow or disallow the plugin to automatically hook into a certain template.

I am not a programmer, I just uncover problems I need solutions for. If I can’t find solutions, I feed them through to my programmers.
Whilst I haven’t looked into this in depth, I have a feeling this would require some form of modification to the core. That is potentially ok for my own sites, but not very suitable for widespread distribution.

It could alternatively be created as an include for future plugin authors to use, but that would require widescale adoption by plugin authors and updates to plugins that already exist, which I feel is a little drastic.

Maybe this is something that is already going to be included in some future version of Widgets, such that maybe you would have multiple “widget templates” that control all code relating to every hook on every template, independant of the templates themselves.

It is possible some of the commercial offerings offer some of this functionality, and if I implemented it, in all honestly it would also have to be a semi-commercial undertaking with some form of pro version for those managing multiple commercial blogs that needed additional functionality.

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