In my recent bit on blogging software I mentioned a few shortcomings of Nucleus CMS.
I am missing a better WYSIWYG post editor, sub-categories for posts and multipaged posts.
I was suspecting that these needs might have been solved with plugins. I didn’t check the availability of these plugins and that makes me feel guilty and curious at the same time. I have browsed through the plugin list and found out that everything can be, indeed, fixed. Thus, here is a todo list for my next maintenance window for this site.
- Upgrade Nucleus CMS installation from version 3.15 to version 3.20 (or whatever version will be the latest by that time). Some plugins that I am planning to install require version to be equal or greater than 3.20. Plus, of course, I don’t want to be running old bugs when I can have a selection of new ones.
- Install NP_WYSIWYG_RTE.php plugin. It provides a better post editor.
- Install NP_PingPong.php plugin. I have only weblogs.com pinged automatically now. Technorati is done manually by me and only when I don’t feel too lazy to click on the browser button. With this plugin everything will be pinged automatically, which is a good thing.
- Install NP_PageBreak.php plugin. This will allow me to break long posts into multiple pages. “Vim for Perl Developers” is the first candidate.
- Install NP_MultipleCategories.php plugin. Cross-posting articles in multiple categories improves navigation and searching for specific post. This is something I often miss.
- Install NP_Captcha.php plugin. One of the most effective SPAM fighting mechanism for web forms is asking a user to read some string from the image and write it down in the form field. This plugin provides just that.
Probably I will find another one or two plugins to install that will improve the experience with this site.