Welcome to my blog

One of the main parts of this blog is the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for managing the books I’m reading and have read. The plugin is great providing library, page, author, tag and search views. It also has a review/rating system where you can rate a book and write a review. However it does not provide a template to display favourites; like a “top 10″ list of highest-rated books. So I thought I’d write one. It was a bit of a challenge figuring out the URL structure, but once I did that, the template implementation was reasonably simple; the functions I wanted were already implemented in the plugin just not exposed in the provided templates.

This post is a summary of how I implemented the favourites page, including the URL structure required for Now Reading, how I added the new page functionality to the plugin code, and how I implemented the new template page…
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One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that the user community has developed to extend and enhance the basic blog functionality. Some plugins, such as WP-PluginsUsed, are simple and add a function or two you can embed in a page and are implemented as a single php file. Others, such as Now Reading Reloaded, provide significant functionality and involve many files.

Some plugins are purely for administration of the blog, such as Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, whereas others provide functionality viewable to your readers. I have found the need to tweak some of these, sometimes for look’n'feel, sometimes for functionality. But managing modified plugins can be a challenge. This article looks at the common areas of customisation and how they can be managed.
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Along with the changes I made last weekend (Added some menu functions) I’ve added a few other plugins to make the blog a bit more usable. These included adding some social bookmarking links and blog statistics.
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I’ve had a chance to tweak the site a bit, adding some new plugins to help with the menus and using some WordPress role capabilities to hide/control some content. Plus I’ve put a login form and logout function on the main page.
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