A working list of the WordPress plugins behind TheThunderbird.ca, the student publication of the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, published ahead of a session at the AEJMC annual conference in Denver in August 2010. The panel, Planning, Launching and Running a Convergent Student News Website, ran on 4 August from 1:30 to 3:45pm under the Twitter tag #aejmcsite, with links posted to Delicious and handouts put online.
For multimedia the site used Audio Player 2.0 for audio, NextGEN Gallery for photo galleries and Viper’s Video Quicktags for video. Sharing and discovery were handled by ShareThis for social bookmarking, TweetMeme for tweeting and tracking, and All in One SEO. Under the hood sat Role Manager for user permissions, Google XML Sitemaps and WordPress Database Backup. The measurement and housekeeping layer was Ultimate Google Analytics, Statpress Reloaded for audience data and Akismet against comment spam.
The twelve were offered as a starting point for journalism educators planning or overseeing a student site rather than as a definitive stack, and readers were asked to name the plugins they considered essential. Most of the named plugins have since been retired or absorbed into WordPress itself, but the categories the list is organised around still describe what a student newsroom has to solve.