To scratch an itch, I’ve hacked a simple plugin, that makes it easier to link to friends and category topics.

When enclosing the name of a friend, a friend’s blog name, or a category name, in {}, the plugin takes care of turning it into a link, including XFN link relations for friends. If a category or link isn’t found for a particular name, a warning will be shown above the post preview in the administration interface, but the text will be left alone.

Now, whenever I link to Danny Ayers, all I have to do is write his name within curly brackets: {Danny Ayers}. Same goes for my {RSS} category: RSS.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that, a few prerequisites need to be in order. Luckily, they coincide with the requirements of my FOAF output hack:

• Categories must have only a URI in their description.
• Link URIs must be to the weblog of the person.
• Link name must be the name of the weblog.
• Link description must be the name of the person.

Download the plugin: Linkifier (rename to linkifier.php and place it in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory)
View source: Linkifier Source

One thing missing from the default WordPress setup is the lack of previous/next links. Fixing this is not really a problem though, as WordPress includes a number of template functions, among which are next_post and previous_post. Both of these take care of all the necessary logic, so that the correct links are displayed, and only when necessary, i.e. only when displaying a single post. I decided to put the links at the top of the post page, next to the post metadata such as categories and author (in the file /index.php):

<div class="meta"> 
    <span class="nav-prev"><?php previous_post('&laquo; %', ''); ?></span> 
    <span class="nav-next"><?php next_post('% &raquo;', ''); ?></span> 
    <?php _e("Filed under:"); ?> <?php the_category() ?> &#8212; <?php the_author() ?> @ <?php the_time() ?> <?php edit_post_link(); ?> 
</div>

Another thing that I thought would be nice, was only showing excerpts on pages with a large number of posts. This is also quite easy, thanks to the get_excerpt template function:

<?php if(sizeof($posts)>get_settings('posts_per_page')) : ?>
  <div class="storyexcerpt"> 
    <?php the_excerpt(); ?> 
  </div>  
<?php else: ?>
  <div class="storycontent"> 
    <?php the_content(); ?> 
  </div>  
  <div class="feedback"> 
    <?php wp_link_pages(); ?> 
    <?php comments_popup_link(__('Comments (0)'), __('Comments (1)'), __('Comments (%)')); ?> 
  </div>  
<?php endif; ?>

Finally, I wanted to fiddle a little with the CSS, styling the posts so that a category specific icon is displayed next to posts in that category. To accomplish this, I had to add some category information to the class attribute of the div containing the post:

<div class="post<? foreach(get_the_category() as $cat){ print(' post-category-'.$cat->category_nicename);}; ?>">

With this in place, the CSS is easily tweaked to display an icon next to the post title (note that only the last one of the rules will be in effect for posts in multiple categories, so ordering is important):

.post-category-wordpress h3 { 
  background: url(/images/wp-button.png) no-repeat right;
}
.post-category-foaf h3 { 
  background: url(/images/foaf-tiny.png) no-repeat right;
}

Improving this approach to be able to handle more than one category icon at a time is left as an exercise for the reader…