Welcome to Wordpress for Scientists

[Martin Fenner]

Dear all,

welcome to the Wordpress for Scientists Google Group. The goal of this group is to promote Wordpress as a tool for writing and distributing scholarly content. Wordpress is used by many science bloggers, and I'm sure we can improve Wordpress as a writing tool for them. Wordpress is also used for lab notebooks and scholarly papers, but several limitations (e.g. reference management) have so far limited a more widespread use for this purpose. This group can hopefully become a central discussion place for these ideas.

Ideas

What plugins, themes or other Wordpress tools should we develop? What are the most interesting projects and who is interested in helping with them?

Best Practices

• What are recommended plugins for science blogging, writing scholarly papers, etc.?
  
• Should plugin developers use a common tag (e.g. "science") when submitting their plugins to the Wordpress plugins directory?
  
• Can we agree on standards for scholarly content in Wordpress, e.g. import/export formats? 

Development

The group should support developers interested in creating science-specific plugins. This could mean practical advice and/or help in testing. I'm particularly interested in making the different tools work better together. It would also be nice to coordinate the work so that we for example come up with one great paragraph-level commenting tool instead of five that work most of the time. And it would be helpful to know who is already working on a particular project or idea. 

I'm personally most interested in developing solid reference management tools for Wordpress, including integration with available reference managers. I'm fairly new to Wordpress, but have released four Wordpress plugins in the past few weeks (Contact Info Options, BibTex Importer, Link to Link, ePub Export). 

Kind regards,

Martin