Siolon

WordPress Plugins for Writers

Wait, aren’t all Word­Press users writ­ers? Well, not exactly. A lot of peo­ple use the Word­Press plat­form to talk about their pets, fam­ily, or odd Star Trek fetish (which is fine); but there are users of Word­Press who sub­ject them­selves the rig­ors of pro­fes­sional writ­ing. This post really is for those want­ing to improve their blog’s typog­ra­phy.

When I started my first blog I found that the more seri­ous I took it and the more involved my posts got that I needed more func­tion­al­ity. I wanted my blog to look and act less like a blog and more like an online print jour­nal. It was this desire that started my look for Word­Press plu­g­ins that could address the desires I had, and these are the best.

WP-Footnotes

The first thing I needed was a way to cite sources and make addi­tional com­men­tary in my writ­ings, and foot­notes are the per­fect way to do that (even though they tech­ni­cally are end­notes, but the plu­gin does pag­i­nate). WP-Footnotes is an incred­i­ble plu­gin to accom­plish this effec­tively. It has a lot of options, and it’s incred­i­bly easy to use. You sim­ply choose what the mark­ing for the foot­noted is (by default it’s dou­ble paren­the­sis), and when your post is ren­dered to the client it cre­ates all the links for you.

A recent ver­sion has a smooth scrolling option that I do not like how­ever. I instead plugged in another smooth scrolling script, and it turned out much better.

JavaScript Pull-Quotes

One of the things I like most about print pub­li­ca­tions are attrac­tive pull-quotes, and with the JavaScript Pull-Quotes plu­gin you can achieve nice pull-quotes. It also has many options includ­ing dif­fer­ent styles to choose for quote. You can even have it auto­mat­i­cally cycle between quot­ing to the left and right! This is the best way to improve an arti­cle aesthetically.

Table of Con­tents Generator

One of the things I enjoy about Wikipedia is how it can give you a quick glance at the article’s con­tent through a table of con­tents. Gen­er­at­ing this func­tion­al­ity in your Word­Press posts hap­pen through the Table of Con­tents Gen­er­a­tor Word­Press Plu­gin.

It has no need to use spe­cial markup like the ones above, because it auto­mat­i­cally scans the head­ings in the posts and cre­ates a table of con­tents. The plu­gin will also rec­og­nize top-level and sub-headings. It is a great reminder to use head­ings in your posts which dras­ti­cally improves the seman­tic value of your content.

In Series Word­Press Plugin

Often times when writ­ing about a topic in-depth it’s advis­able to break it up for the reader. The way to do this before would be to cre­ate a page announc­ing the series and pro­vide links to all the arti­cles in the series. Well no more! The In Series Word­Press Plu­gin makes this task seam­less. The plu­gin adds an option to add it to a series, and the plu­gin gen­er­ates the nec­es­sary con­nec­tions between the con­tent. It’s great, because it requires no hack­ing of your template–it works right out of the box!

Even though I per­son­ally haven’t got to give this plu­gin a go, I’m excited to really make use of this one. Writ­ing series is a great way to present lengthy con­tent on the web, and this plu­gin takes all of the work out of doing so (besides the writ­ing of course).

WP-Typogrify

The last deals specif­i­cally with improv­ing all the lit­tle things in typog­ra­phy that we tra­di­tion­ally miss but make a dif­fer­ence. This is a port from the orig­i­nal Python script for Word­Press, and it car­ries the name WP-Typogrify. This does things such as insert­ing inline styles to adjust the CSS around all-caps, amper­sands, and does impor­tant lit­tle things such as turn­ing dou­ble hyphens into em-dashes and much more.