Wordpress Plugin for Academic Citations
Published by Jeremy Douglass March 30th, 2006 in Text Art.
Announcing a new Wordpress plugin: Academic Citations!
The plugin automatically generates citations at the foot of every blog post in five common formats: AMA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and MLA. It is well documented and installation is simple: upload and activate the plugin, insert a line into your template, and add optional CSS to your stylesheet. Try it by clicking the link at the end of this post, then download to add citations to your WP blog.
The plugin is the result of a happy collaboration. After my previous blog post on citation footers for academic blogging, and my first stab at a solution (using WordPress template tags), I was feeling some trepidation about actually taking the time off from my other projects to learn how to write my first WordPress plugin… until I was contacted by Julie Meloni.
Julie is the technical director of the Northern California interactive media firm i2i interactive, a grad student in English at San Jose State University, and the author of a multitude of technical books on Blogging, Plone, PHP and Apache/MySQL. Like me she had yet to write her first Wordpress plugin, but she was willing to pitch in with her (literally) volumes of PHP experience. We put our heads together with Christy Dena and the three of us said “Let’s do this!”
I contributed my original idea and worked up design notes, Christy gave feedback and did beta testing on her other site, and Julie assumed authoring responsibility, doing all the heavy lifting of transforming the original template tags and pseudocode into a professional standards-compliant plugin. The resulting plugin already sports extra features like visibility hiding, and as a result is both useful and unobtrusive. Some of our goals on our future roadmap: exportable file-format citations (BibTeX, EndNote), support for comments, and ways for the site to customize which formats are displayed. Julie is also considering an adaptation for systems like Blogger and Moveable Type.
To check out the plugin, (currently in v0.3.3), go to Julie’s website, Academic Sandbox.
6 Responses to “Wordpress Plugin for Academic Citations”
- 1 Pingback on Apr 24th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
- 2 Pingback on Apr 30th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
- 3 Pingback on Jun 6th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Very cool!
The GTxA crew is swamped right now, but I’m going to propose that we put a link to citation info at the bottom of our posts, using this plugin, when one of us has a moment.
I’ve just installed this plugin in my WordPress 1.5.0.3 site. Everything works except getting the “authordata” information on first and last name. Is that specific to WordPress 2.x?
This is a WP 2.0 plugin.