One lesser known skills of our very own Mark Ghosh is his strong coding abilities and his occasional WordPress Plugins that he makes available to all our readers.
Two such plugins were the Moderation Notify Author and Contextual Related Posts, written long long ago. With the arrival of WordPress 2.7, we felt it time to update the plugins and so here we are!
Moderation Notify Author
The problem on multiple-author blogs running WordPress is that it doesn’t automatically notify the author of a post about waiting comments. Instead all comment moderation requests go to the admin.
This plugin will notify the author of the post in addition to the admin and thus allow the author to share the responsibility of moderating comments on his posts.
The plugin is smart enough to ensure that the admin does not get a duplicate email.
Running a multi-author blog? Read more and download Moderation Author Notify.
Contextual Related Posts
Checked out the Related Posts that you see at the bottom of this post?
This plugin will allow you to display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. The number of posts can be configured via the admin panel as well as the title you want to display before the list of posts.
You can also choose to automatically display the posts after the content of your post as well as in feeds. You can also choose to manually display the posts where you want.
The posts displayed are based on a “fuzzy” search and so will display related posts even for those with no tags.
Read more and download Contextual Related Posts
We’re running both the plugins on this blog. I also have both plugins installed on my technology blog Techtites and Contextual Related Posts on my personal blog.
We’re looking to improve the features of both these plugins, so either comment below or on their individual pages with suggestions and feature requests.
Contextual Text Posts plugin looks excellent. Sounds like an interesting way to do the related posts. Is there ever an issue with page load time and queries like this?
The plugin has been running on this blog for many, many years. While it does take a performance hit, it is not noticeable.
Additionally, if you have a caching plugin in place, then there isn’t much to worry about.
Thanks for the contextual posts plugin : found it via my wordpress suite. Ill try it out. Im not sure how powerful it is going to be on my site which only has approx 200 articles. We’ll see…
Thanks again !
I’m a little confused about your statement above “…Instead all comment moderation requests go to the admin.”
I run a multi-author blog (WP 2.6.2) and it definitely does NOT send all moderation notifications to the Admin (me) – it sends them to the post authors. For a number of reasons I do NOT want notifications going to the authors, I want them to go to me (the admin) so I’m using a plugin (Multi Author Comment Notification) that does the opposite of the one you wrote about on this post (Moderation Author Notify) to get WP to do what I want, and even at that the plugin I use is not perfect – it doesn’t “stop” WP from sending notifications to the authors, it simply includes me in the notifications, and I tell my authors to disregard the emails they get from WP.
What am I missing? Is there a way to get WP to behave as you say the default behavior is supposed to be – send notifications only to the admin?
Don’t confuse the different emails.
Moderation notification emails go to the admin only. These say “a comment is waiting for you to moderate it”.
Comment notification emails go to the post author. These say “your post just got a new approved comment on it”.
These are two different emails.
Aha…..thank you for clarifying….I did misunderstand. I’m still looking for a way to have all notifications sent to me, so I’ll keep searching. Thanks for the response.
Didn’t that plugin above (Multi Author) satisfy this requirement?
Actually only sort of……it does send a “cc:” of comment notifications to the admin email address, but it doesn’t interfere with WP’s sending of emails to the post author. It’s an unusual situation, that the site wants all comment notifications filtered thru the admin, and this is the best I can do right now.
I forgot to ask this earlier, but why would you not want your author to receive comment notification?
Superb plugins! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Interesting plugin, but I’m more interested on the “Visitors who read this post, also read” one!
Coming soon 🙂
cool!
I’ve already found the plugin, but a review is always good.