Archive for April 2009
BeerMe Plugin - Add Donations To Your Website
Posted on April 30, 2009, under Plugins and Tags.
Marcos Placona has created a plugin that allows you to add a Paypal donation link to the bottom of each post. You can read more in his blog post and in the project site at RIAForge.
Scribe Plugin Updated
Posted on April 28, 2009, under Plugins and Tags.
Adam Tuttle has updated his Scribe (blog email subscriptions) plugin. He made two updates, the first one includes:
- Support for double opt-in user validation requirement, as a new setting on the settings page.
- Subscriber management, export, and import has been added to the settings page.
- Prompt the blog administrator to visit the settings page upon activation, to configure.
- Minor bug fixes
In the second update, he added a configurable setting for the email to use when sending the notification email.
The address to use to update your current version or to install it is: http://fusiongrokker.com/get/Scribe
Goodbye Captcha, Hello CFFormProtect
Posted on April 15, 2009, under Plugins and Tags.
Nobody likes Captchas, but getting hundreds of spam comments is no fun. The currently available captcha plugins for Mango would keep most automated comment spam at bay. Every now and then you get a real person filling out the form. At that point you would need another line of defense, such as Akismet. I have used both approaches combined with good results. Using Akismet alone works, but it is not 100% infallible, so I still needed the captcha. Until now.
CFFormProtect is a comprehensive protection system that uses several methods aimed at finding whether or not certain message is spam, without a Captcha! so no user interaction is needed. And Mango has now two plugins that use CFFormProtect to check for spam before a comment is entered or before an email is sent with the FormToEmail plugin.
CFFormProtect by Seb Duggan. It includes a nice admin page to tweak its settings.
CFFormProtect by Anthony Fojas. (it requires you to download CFFormProtect separately)
Note: They have the same name, so they would conflict with each other if you install both.
Blog Email Subscriptions Plugin
Posted on April 10, 2009, under Plugins and Tags.
The number one request at the feedback website was a subscription plugin that would allow readers to be notified by email when a new post is added. While it seems that this would be an easy plugin to develop, it has some issues such as what to do when a post has a publishing date in the future, or a draft is published.
Two developers took on the task of creating the plugin, and they released their plugins within the same week. So take your pick!
Scribe has been developed by Adam Tuttle. It has some special features such as taking care of the future posting date, and giving you the option of customizing the email using a template.
Blog Subscriber has been developed by Mel Williams and she has already released an update based on some user suggestions.
Thanks to Adam and Mel for providing these plugins! I am thinking on adding this to the main Mango distribution since it was such a requested plugin (if they let me do it :) ).
Spam filtering plugin: Spammy!
Posted on April 07, 2009, under Plugins and Tags.
Doug Jones has created a plugin that will prevent comment spam by filtering on keywords.
