David’s Technical Musings

I found a truly wonderful plugin for helping readers learn the terminology used on a web site - Wikipedia Autolink by Cristiano Fino.  This plugin uses a shortcode-like mechanism for creating a link to a topic for a term on Wikipedia^W, like so:

[W:{term}]

This will create a link in one of several ways, depending on how you have the plugin configured.  Let’s go through the options and see how they affect what is displayed.

Plugin Options

The options page for the plugin is available on the Plugin menu, not the Settings menu.  This is different than most other plugins I’ve used, but I prefer it there. Here is what the plugins page looks like with its defaults.

Localization code

This option allows you to specify the code for the language to use for links to Wikipedia.

Autolink Icon

This option specifies whether the icon that is displayed next to the term is the link to Wikipedia or if the word is the link.  Note that you can enable this on a per-post/page basis by including in your post/page.

Enable default CSS style

This option specifies whether the styles built-in to the plugin are used for the term and the icon or if the term and the icon are displayed using class names for the style.  If this option is enabled, the default styles for the term and the icon are:

$cf_wikiterm = "padding-bottom: 2px; border-bottom: 1px dotted #DD0000"
$cf_wikiicon = "font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Serif; font-weight: bold; color: #AAAAAA";

These styles display the term with a red dotted line under it and the icon as a gray raised W.

If this option is disabled, the term will use the wikiterm class and the icon will use the wikiicon class.  You can then define these classes in your theme so that these terms fit better with the overall design of the theme.

Note that if you want to display the term without it being a link, you can specify a :0 after it, for example: [W:WordPress].  I’m not really sure how this would be used, though, as it seems to me that if you don’t want the link you may as well just remove the shortcode notation altogether.

Enable NOFOLLOW in hyperlink

This option will add nofollow to the hyperlink to tell search engines not to follow the link.

Examples

Here are some examples as they would appear on this site.

With the default settings (autolink icon = No, enable default CSS style = Yes):

With autolink icon = Yes, enable default CSS style = Yes):

With autolink icon = Yes, enable default CSS style = No):

With autolink icon = No, enable default CSS style = No):

Conclusions/Recommendations

I really like this plugin because it makes it so easy to add links to terms on Wikipedia without having to worry about making the actual linkage.  I can also be selective about which terms become links as well as how those links are displayed.  As good as it is, there are a couple things that could be improved in the plugin:

• Allow text other than the term to be displayed.  For example, allow me to specify that I want wordpress.org to be displayed but specify the term as WordPress.
• Allow style information to be specified on a per-term basis.  For example, allow me to specify whether I want an icon to be displayed or not and whether I want the default CSS style or not right in the shortcode.
• Display links to the author’s web page and/or to the wordpress.org page for the plugin right on the options page.  I recommend this for all options pages, especially those not part of the core.  Doing this allows a user to easily find reference material on the options should they have a question about how to configure the plugin.
• Display examples of what the term would look like on the page.  This isn’t fool-proof, due to differences in the admin page background and the background of the page where terms would be displayed, but it would be helpful when making a decision on how to set the options.
• Display the default CSS styles on the options page.  This may not be as important if examples can be displayed as suggested in the previous point.
• Use standard admin panel styles on the options page.  This can be found by looking at the source for any of the core options pages.  Not a biggie, but it would cause the options page to fit in better with the rest of the options pages.
• Allow the text to be displayed as the title on the link to be specified.
• Set the download link on the plugin page to point to the WordPress page. That way everyone gets the plugin from the same place.

All these recommendations are just nits as the plugin is simple (which is a good thing) and works well the way it is.

One more interesting note.  The author originally wrote this for another blogging platform - BlogEngine.NET.  I think that is quite impressive as a colleague and I were recently searching for an ASP.NET^W-based blogging platform that is similar to WordPress.  It isn’t quite as full-featured and it doesn’t have near the size of community, but it is a very nice platform nonetheless.

Resources

• Download page on wordpress.org
• Author’s page for the plugin
• Author’s page for the BlogEngine.NET extension (in Italian)