Top Six Mango Blog Plugins

Part of the ColdFusiontology effort being undertaken by the nerds of Brice Cheddarn Development includes spreading the word about our favorite blog engine, Mango Blog.

Mango Blog is an easily customizable blog engine built with ColdFusion that provides a way to administer and publish entries.  It also provies the necessary architecture to extend its basic functionality by adding plugins.  It comes with a set of plugins out-of-the-box, but others have begun to write their own plugins to help expand upon this powerful ColdFusion blogging tool.  And some of those plugins need recognition.

As such, I wanted to put together a quick list of the Top Six Mango Blog plugins that are currently available.  With the growing number of plugins for Mango Blog, this definitely wasn't an easy list to compile.  This is a completely subjective list that is probably not as thought out as it should be, so please feel free to comment and offer your suggestions.

PostByEmail - This pluginby TJ Downes allows users to send blog posts to their site via email.  Since blog posts can be sent to your blog from any email address, the plugin requires the username and a site-wide key to be included in the email (space delimited). This prevents spam and unauthorized posts to your blog.  This is one of the greatest features of WordPress, and I am really glad to see it being added to Mango Blog. Find out more: http://postbyemail.riaforge.org/

Beer Me - "Like this post?  Buy me a beer!".  This plugin by Marcos Placona for Mango Blog allows sites to add a link to PayPal at the bottom of each post.  The links are personalized, so users can keep track of which blog post generated more donations.  Simple but clever, and once I first saw it utilized on a site, I saw the potential.  If Ben Nadel used Mango Blog, I would have bought many a beer for him.  I probably owe Laura a beer or two, too, but she strikes me as more of a wine person.  Find out more: http://beerme.riaforge.org/

Comment Moderation - This plugin, written by the creator of Mango Blog, Laura Arguello, adds comment moderation options to the admin Settings page.  This is an extremely convenient tool, and now makes Mango Blog more of an option in the corporate environment.  Find out more:  http://www.asfusion.com/

Scribe - With this plugin by Adam Tuttle, a site can allow readers to subscribe to be notified by email when a new post is added.  This helps to generate repeat visitors to a site, which is always a good thing. Find out more: http://fusiongrokker.com/post/scribe-email-subscriptions-for-mango

jQuery - This plugin written by Seb Duggan (who also appears to be addicted to writing Mango Blog plugins) will include the jQuery JavaScript library onto the pages of the site.  This plugin helps add to the extensiblity of Mango Blog.  With this plugin, developers can specify that the jQuery plugin is required for their own plugin to work.  Find out more: http://sebduggan.com/posts/jquery-plugin-for-mango

Lightbox - This is a great plugin by Mark Aplet, who appears to be slightly addicted to writing Mango Blog plugins (Easy Retweet, CSS Naked Day, Memento).  I say this out of envy, of course.  Lightbox is a simple script used to overlay images on the current page.  It's easy to setup and works on all modern browsers.  This plugin (now being developed by Adam Tuttle) will add the necessary JavaScript and CSS to every page Mango outputs (aside from admin), and enables advanced linking in TinyMCE. Find out more:  http://fusiongrokker.com/page/projects/lightbox-mango-plugin

The nerds here have several plugin ideas whiteboarded out and theorized.  And they kick ass!  As soon as things die down a bit, we will develop them for all to use.  Of course, if someone wanted to contract us out to solely develop Mango Blog plugins, there would be no complaints I can assure you.

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