As always, if someone would like to implement this idea before I get around to it, please do so.

I envision this plugin adding a drop down menu of all the availalble anti-spam plugins as an option to the "Visibility/Sharing" menu when creating a new post. When the site is viewed, the post's title is visible and instead of the text of the post, the anti-spam test is present. Once the visitor submits a correct test, the text of the page would load.

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b2evolution provides the register.php file, which could probably be tweaked to provide this functionality: remove the login and password-fields and change up which database entries get updated, and you'd be good to go on the frontend. The back end would need a little work...

This is not a unique idea to me, there have been many requests on the forums for a newsletter-type plugin, however, they do have a focus on mailing registered users, whereas I don't want to make registration (creating a login/password) on my blog a requirement. This is just a sampling:
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=16393&highlight=newsletter (2008-08)
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=11987&highlight=newsletter (2007-07)
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=9443&highlight=newsletter (2006-10)
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=16454 (2008-08 - mailsender plugin download)

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The Research:

1. You can create new Post types by going to "Global settings" -> "Post types" -> Create a new element.
2. The "Post types" tab is created in skins_adm/_adminui_general.class.php: all the tabs are generated by an array passed to add_menu_entries(); the link to "Post types" is "admin.php?ctrl=itemtypes".
3. admin.php does not have "itemtypes" spelled out in it; it seems to sanitize what's passed in and then calls the requested controller: "$inc_path.$ctrl_mappings[$ctrl];"; according to conf/_admin.php, the controller mapping for "itemtypes" is "items/item_types.ctrl.php".
4. inc/items/item_types.ctrl.php displays the "Post types" page.
5. While we're in the inc/items directory, let's look at items.ctrl.php: the only Plugin events that are called is AdminBeforeItemEditCreate, AdminBeforeItemEditUpdate, and AdminBeforeItemEditDelete.
6. items.ctrl.php uses the $AdminUI->disp_view() method to load 'items/views/_item_expert.form.php' for the "expert" new post form
7. Inside the _item_expert.form.php file, the Plugin events AdminDisplayToolbar, AdminDisplayEditorButton, and AdminDisplayItemFormFieldset are called.

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http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=15207
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=16696

The Idea: The Plugin Manager would add a "Plugins" tab to the Blog settings screen. From here, the blog owner (not necessarly the administrator) would be able to enable and disable the plugins he[1] wants to enable on that individual blog. It would also provide a transparent (can we say complicated‽) way of allowing the owner to change the configuration of the plugins without modifying the global settings.

[1]While I appreciate the effort to include the feminine perspective in writing, typing out "him or her", "hers or his", "he or she", etc, is time consuming and reading it breaks the flow of the prose. I'll continue to use the masculine form to include the feminine as I learned back in the day, and hope that my readers understand I mean no disrepsect to anyone.

Introduction to reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.
--http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Rather than generating a random string of characters for a user to solve to prove their humanity, reCAPTHCA scans old print media and uses the Internet masses as a decentralized optical character recognition (OCR) program. One of the words presented is known, the other is not. The assumption made is that if the known word is submitted correctly, then the unknown word is correct as well. Over time, if the same unknown word is solved the same way by multiple reCAPTCHA solvers, then they have a high confidence that is what the word actually is.

To address accessibility concerns of blind people, reCAPTCHA also provides an audio captcha. If your computer does not have the required plugin, it can download an MP3 for you to listen to.

reCAPTCHA Plugin

This plugin allows b2evolution users to assist the reCAPTCHA project in their goal of digitizing old media while providing hurdle for spammers to cross. It is not the ultimate answer to blog spam, but it is one tool available to you. For those who care, starting with the 1.0 version of the reCAPTCHA Plugin, I'm licensing the plugin under the same terms as the reCAPTCHA library, included in the LICENSE file, basically a single-clause BSD license.

I'd love to get feedback from those who are using this plugin, if it is doing its job or if it can be improved. Please leave a comment here or on the b2evolution plugin page or forums. Thanks for your interest!

Download Current

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction (this page)
2. Installation Instructions
3. Configuration Instructions
4. TODO list