Backstage
Mildly arousing layout design of attractive clarity by Craig Grannell.
Craig Grannell says: I do not permit any of this.
Techy rubbish by J Nash.
J Nash says: Did YOU invent php? I despise all of your molecules. Why not kick yourself to death?
And RevStu thought of the name.
RevStu says: Hey, it could have been “Tilt and Swipe.”
A certain degree of practical and spiritual inspiration by our top showbiz chums at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Podgamer runs on WordPress with the help of these pretty plug-ins and much hammering:
Akismet by Automattic
Psychotically diligent spam conker.
Database Back-up by A Matzko
Scheduled auto-saves of everything, or a convenient manually operated button. You’ll probably need the gogglingly complicated PHP My Admin to restore a back-up. (The built-in WordPress Import/Export is fine, except you have to be not crashed to use it.)
Delete Revision by Gohsy
Bin superseded edits to save time and space (not in galactic sense).
Display Time Column in Edit Posts by RS Doyle
If you’ve scheduled an item to be posted at a later date, you’ll have noticed that the Wordp admin page only tells you the day the item’s scheduled to appear and not the time. This is of course totally useless. RS Doyle’s tweak adds a clearly visible Time column so we can space things out when we slightly rewrite 58 press releases, arrange them in a batch and take December off.
Enkoder by M Greenberg
Auto-disguise any e-mail address.
Excerpt Editor by A Ozz
Replace those annoying auto-gen More… extracts with your own summaries. Particularly good at making front page teasers when the first few paragraphs of your item wouldn’t work at all.
Exclude DIV From RSS by K Oseo
We bung the game info (credits, links, &c) at the top of a review. This means the rss summary is entirely obliterated by purposeless facts. K Oseo’s tiny hack means we can hide the game info from rss altogether after a bit of wrestling it into shape. Exc.
Get Recent Comments by K Jodies
Does that thing, flexibly. We crudely patch it to fix the “0 days ago” ugliness.
Last PHPBB3 Topics by Netorx
Actually, all the plug-ins we could find that show the latest posts from a phpbb forum were grotesquely horrible, so we nicked the logic from this one because it had the clearest source and then hamfistedly made our own.
The Recent Banter bit is the results of Get Recent Comments and the Netorx adaptation stirred in a big electro-cauldron.
Lightbox Plus by D Zappone
The bit that fancily pops up any pics you click. This tends to be switched on and off depending on who last crept into the admin section. (Stuart and J Nash think it’s easier to show the pic unadorned in a new window, Craig likes the self-contained effects. Cuh! Artistes.) NB: none of the P Gamer pics is worth clicking on.
Ozh’s Better Feed by Ozh
Apparently WordPress used to let you display items in rss up to the More split, ie like the front page, then someone decided this was flagrantly practical and helpful so the sub was ripped out so derangedly that it is impossible to reinstate. Ozh’s Better Feed comes reasonably close, so we nicked the central bit. (WP RSS Images by Alaingg is also associated with the recomp.) Everything is still slightly off though because of the depth of Wordp’s baffling raze.
R Marsh’s Plug Parade: Plug-in Output Cache; Post-Plug Library; and Similar Posts
Similar Posts does that thing, with the other two in support. We clumsily patch S Posts so it returns results instead of echoing them. (Fancy WordPress jargon that makes it look like we know what we’re on about.) Note that we don’t use R Marsh’s Recent Comments, preferring K Jodies’ one mentioned above. (UPDATE. Tragically, Plug-in Output Cache clashes with WP Postviews. If you’re trying this sort of thing and Postviews undissuadably tells you “N/A,” switch off PO Cache. To emulate the P Gamer version, first stare in a furious rage at “N/A” reports and type increasingly unhingedly for an entire evening. A strange but helpful thing is that it seems once WP Postviews has a couple of results under its belt you can switch PO Cache back on without further incident.)
Raw HTML Capability (feat Text Unruiner) by W Shadow
For things beyond WordPress’s ken and generally shutting up those trademark formatting options piecemeal when they inexplicably make all the quotation marks go wrong on one of your pages and such. (Corollary tip: use Screen Options in the WordPress Dashboard to switch off Custom Fields so half your editing page isn’t inexplicably taken up with gigantically overwrought text form duplicates of the Raw HTML buttons.)
Sociable for WordPress 3 by T Pokress
The buttony links that you can click to inflict P Gamer’s items on people you pretend to know, lightly sprinkled with magic Craig dust so the pics are niftier. (A spin-off from the original Sociable; we ended up buying the Pro version for the extra gubbins, but binned the hideously unwieldy and backstage-wrecking Facebook Like button, which to be fair is Facebook’s fault.) (We also edited it so the item excerpt needed by, say, Digg, omitted a review’s info line so the enticing snippet wasn’t mostly, “It is 59p,” and, “It is the game name again.”)
Tiny MCE Advanced by A Ozz
Extends the Visual Editor. We use it so RevStu can add Craig’s fancy-dan layout’s icons, etc, with the click of a button instead of typing in a bunch of HTML and css. I think another button blows his nose for him.
Twitter Tools and Twitter Tools bit.ly by Crowd Favourite Now stamped into a bin and replaced by WP to Twitter (see below) which actually works.
Tweets a bit.ly link whenever a new P Gamer item is posted, like it’s 2008 or something.
WordPress Stats by Automattic
Some stats. We also use Google Analytics. I think they hang around on opposite sides of the electro-road and try to tempt you into their respective lodgings by waving gaudy counterfeit watches and/or displaying their untrousered calves.
WP Postviews by L Chan
We use it to find the Most Read items, thanks to the working but bafflingly undocumented non-echo bit. (See R Marsh’s Plug Parade above for disaster avoidance.)
WP Post Ratings by L Chan
The uppy-downy thumb rater (though you can have stars and things instead). Again, we use the undocumented non-echo bit so we can commit hideous indignities on the gathered info. Replacement thumbs by Golden Dragon, from their own (overboardly comprehensive) ratings plug-in.
WP Super Cache by DO Caoimh
The superest cache-r.
WP to Twitter by J Dolson
Tweets a bit.ly link whenever a new P Gamer item is posted like it’s 2008 or something, with about fifty million thousand hundred options. Replaced Twitter Tools (see above) by virtue of working. (Tip: switch off global Twitter warnings in Advanced Options, otherwise the plug-in will diligently pass on in huge flashing dramatic letters internal Twitter responses like, “Everything is fine,” and, “This link was temporarily queued but everything is fine now,” which happens approximately ALL THE TIME.) We slightly hack it to get the twits juuust as we want them.
Javascript style switcher (the “Change your font style” bit) by A List Apart. Tawdry ads by Google. Winds light to variable. We love you all, except anyone who likes php. Whoever in WordPress altered the source so it unstoppably capitalises the middle of the name can also fall down a well.