Create A Glossary for Your WordPress Site

I’ve been look­ing for a way to cre­ate a glos­sary for this site that would:

• allow alpha­bet­i­cal nav­i­ga­tion, of course. And take full advan­tage of a Word­Press post’s title, excerpt and body for its display.
• auto­mat­i­cally insert an indi­ca­tor next to the glos­sary term in any post or page that links directly to the glossary.
• use WordPress’s cat­e­gories to cre­ate hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures. The idea here is that you can cre­ate hier­ar­chies to show rela­tion­ships like syn­onyms or antonyms. I am only guess­ing that this is possible.

Well, two of three ain’t bad. (I’m still won­der­ing if there is a way to show rela­tion­ships between glos­sary terms.) To see the results in action, con­sider the term, micro­for­mats. The pen­cil icon small caps font indi­cates it is a glos­sary term. Click­ing it the term brings you to the Note­book Glos­sary and a brief descrip­tion. Click­ing on the title brings up the com­plete post.

In ver­sion 0.7 of his WP-SNAP! plu­gin, Nathan has restored the abil­ity to pass a cat­e­gory num­ber directly to the plu­gin, mak­ing it once again com­pat­i­ble with Word­Press Pages. This is great news, but I’ve opted not to intro­duce a glos­sary until all three of my glos­sary cri­te­ria can be met.

Step-by-Step

1. Install and con­fig­ure WP-SNAP! Nathan’s clever plu­gin (v0.5.1) offers a way to nav­i­gate through a cat­e­gory of posts using alpha­bet­ized pag­i­na­tion. Install and acti­vate the plu­gin as per his direc­tions. In the con­fig­u­ra­tion options, I elected to dis­play both title and excerpt, and accepted the default for the rest.
2. Cre­ate a Glos­sary Page and a unique glos­sary cat­e­gory. All glos­sary posts will be assigned to this cat­e­gory. Add this line, which will dis­play con­tent for a glos­sary cat­e­gory only, to the Page
3. Include the con­di­tional func­tion, which checks to see if the plu­gin is enabled, and with­out which the page borks when the plu­gin is dis­abled. Replace catID with your cat­e­gory ID:

   <?php
     if (function_exists('wp_snap')) {
     echo wp_snap('catID');
   ?>

4. Install and con­fig­ure Ubernyms. Jaykul’s remark­able plu­gin (v2.5) lets you con­fig­ure words that you always want linked. In fact, it does far more than this, in par­tic­u­lar can be used to con­fig­ure a set of fre­quently used abbre­vi­a­tions. But for this project, sim­ply add each new term to the con­fig­u­ra­tion panel, assign­ing each one as Just Link and a Make Link to the glos­sary (e.g. for micro­for­mats it’s …/glossary/?snap=M)
5. Add CSS styling. Sur­pris­ingly, this step requires most of the effort. WP-SNAP! does not include any styling, so you must pull out the style sheet and go to town. Ubernyms does include styling, to which I added these lines to insert a small book icon next to the link to indi­cate it is a glos­sary item:

   a.uttJustLink {
     background: url('/pencil.png') center right no-repeat; padding-right: 12px;
   }

Lim­i­ta­tions

I am quite happy to have my Note­book Glos­sary up and run­ning almost effort­lessly. Still, noth­ing is perfect:

• There are just too many auto links. I mean, if you are prone to repet­i­tive term syn­drome like I am, and find occa­sion to micro­for­mats this and micro­for­mats that, you find your­self ask­ing how many time do you really need to auto link micro­for­mats to the glos­sary in a sin­gle post? One micro­for­mats link really ought to do.
• There are con­flicts with other link styling plu­g­ins such as Denis de Bernardy’s Exter­nal Links plu­gin.
• By CSS styling the Ubernyms uttJustLink class, I’ve effec­tively elim­i­nated the pos­si­bil­ity of using non-glossary auto links because they too would be styled with the glos­sary book icon. It would be great to be able to add unique styling for glos­sary terms, or use some other tech­nique all together. This is pos­si­ble, but requires mod­i­fy­ing the plu­gin. Jaykul has put this on his to-do list for future plu­gin developments.
• This is less a prob­lem than a missed oppor­tu­nity: The Ubernyms plu­gin makes use of DomTT tool-tips (a javascript library that lets you add cus­tom tool-tips to web pages) that lets you add, say, def­i­n­i­tions to the tool-tip. This lets you read the def­i­n­i­tion of the term sim­ply by hov­er­ing your mouse over the term. There is no need to visit the Glos­sary. Even so, I hes­i­tate to enter the same excerpt twice, in both the glos­sary and tool-tip. That’s anti­thet­i­cal to nature of a database-driven web site.

Feed­back

If you try this approach for cre­at­ing a glos­sary, or any sug­ges­tions how to bet­ter imple­ment this idea, do share it by leav­ing a com­ment here.

In the cur­rent ver­sion of WP-SNAP! (0.61), plu­gin author Nathan has removed the option to pass a cat­e­gory num­ber directly to the plu­gin. This means it is no longer com­pat­i­ble with Pages. Fur­ther­more, I find that Jaykul’s Ubernyms does not play well with Word­Press 2.1. So, I am tak­ing my glos­sary offline until I find a bet­ter solution.

For those (see com­ments) who can’t decide if chrono­log­i­cal or alpha­bet­i­cal nav­i­ga­tion is bet­ter, you might want to inves­ti­gate Owen Kelly’s glos­sary imple­men­ta­tion, which lets you alter­nate between both views. It’s part of his larger “Memi” project, an attempt to build a per­sonal learn­ing space. See the glos­sary in action in the devel­op­ment cat­e­gory page.

A glos­sary Word­Press plu­gin is now avail­able. The Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Mon­i­tor offers IMM-Glossary, a plu­gin that has much of the same func­tion­al­ity as I’ve writ­ten here. It cer­tainly is much eas­ier to use than set­ting up two plu­g­ins to work together. In addi­tion, it offers an option to link to just one instance of a term in a post or page, rather than all of them. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to take advan­tage of the Word­Press posts struc­ture and all the advan­tages that implies, or at least doesn’t inte­grate the terms into posts as well as WP-SNAP! does. For me that’s impor­tant, so I am stick­ing with the method I’ve writ­ten here. Yet, all in all, a plu­gin that def­i­nitely deserves your atten­tion if you want a glos­sary for your Word­Press site.