A web developer and blogger from Russia named Dimox has created a new free plugin for Wordpress called the Article Directory Wordpress plugin. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It gives your Wordpress blog an added functionality where users can submit articles and those articles are listed under categories on a page. The way it basically works is by installing the plugin, you create a page template in Wordpress and the plugin will generate the content on that page.

Make sense? Go to the plugin page for more detailed instructions for setting up the plugin and getting it running. The plugin is still relatively new in it’s existence so there are sure to be some bugs along the way. But if Dimox can get some good feedback on the plugin, hopefully this plugin’s functionality can continue to advance.

The features that this plugin currently has include:

• Simple and handy design using CSS.
• Support WordPress starting from version 2.3 and above.
• Parent category is showing amount of articles in subcategories. The character also include the number of articles in this parent category.
• Ability to display the specified amount of child categories (2nd level).
• Ability to display categories on specified amount of columns.
• Ability to hide all subcategories.
• Ability to exclude the child categories articles from the parent categories archive pages.
• Ability to add icons for parent categories using CSS.
• Ability to get article source code.

The Options in the Admin Panel for this plugin include:

• Ability to hide unnecessary blocks from the “Write/Edit Post” page, if this is not the site administrator. It is “Comments & Pings”, “Excerpt”, “Password Protect” and other blocks. I.e. actually there is only a form of adding the article and the button to send it to moderation.
• Ability to specify the height of the categories block on “Write/Edit Post” page.
• Ability to put the “Terms of article publication” on “Write/Edit Post” page.

My Conclusion So Far

This plugin has great potential, and I’m sure there will be plenty of us who need to add article directories to some of our Wordpress sites. I installed this plugin and enjoyed using it. I will say that there are still quite a few bugs, so I don’t recommend using it yet unless you are technical enough to “get under the hood” and make some tweaks along the way.

Either way, this is a plugin worth bookmarking and keeping an eye on. If it can iron out a few bugs and have just a few more features like the ability to moderate articles as they are coming in, than this could be one of the more advantageous plugins for Wordpress out there.