Matt's Blog

A couple of days ago, I released another WordPress plugin called Twitter Links. What this plugin does is search comments of posts for any mentions of Twitter usernames (in the form of “@mattfreedman”) and then replaces them with a link to the mentioned username’s profile page. It will first check to see if the user actually exists on Twitter.

As this plugin checks Twitter for every username it finds, I strongly recommend using a caching plugin (such as WP Super Cache) with this plugin. Which will both help ease the load on Twitter’s servers, and also speed up your page load times.

This plugin requires cURL to be installed on your server, and has only been tested with PHP 5.2.x. It is available to download here.

Two days ago, I released a plugin called Comment Approval Notification and yesterday I released a WordPress version 2.6 compatible version (it previously required WordPress 2.7, which is still in beta).

The Comment Approval Notification plugin will send comment authors an email when their comment gets approved (if it was held for moderation, of course). The email sent to the comment author is fully customizable using “shortcodes”. Shortcodes are special placeholders (in the form of [shortcode_name]) which allow you to add dynamic information to the email (such as the name of the comment author), and have it replaced with the actual information. A full list of the available shortcodes is available here.

This plugin will be useful for people who require comments to be moderated before being shown, to not leave comment author in the dark as to when their comment will appear.

You can find more information about this plugin, and where to download it, over at it’s plugin page.

Update (November 16, 2008): It turns out this plugin wasn’t quite WordPress 2.6 compatible. I have fixed this and released version 1.1.1, which can be downloaded from here. Thanks to Ricky Buchanan for bringing this to my attention.