As an avid fan of wiki technology and someone who enjoys fostering community on websites I have long been searching for a WordPress plugin that would allow me to open up my stories to visitors. WordPress is is a great platform for publishing and commenting, but I have never been able to find a plugin that would turn it into something more like a wiki until now...

Beyond making visitors actually create an account and have to work their way through the back end of WordPress (thus unmasking the site and dissrupting the experience) I wanted my visitors to be able to contribute an "edit" to a story without even having to sign up or log in. I was about ready to hire someone on Rent A Coder to hack something out for me, thinking through all of the features I wanted such as a "compare submission" page and an extension that would allow people to submit entirely new articles when I stumbled across the TDO Mini Form plugin. This plugin does it all, amazingly well... It includes every single feature I had been longing for and the interface is very well designed. The best part, the plugin is free and the designer is responsive on the support forums.

Now before I go too much further... if you download this plugin, use the donate feature built in to tip the author Mark Cunningham for his great work. I just want to say thanks here formally with this article because what he has created is simply amazing and extremely useful.

Okay, back to the overview! If you have wordpress installed already for your site just login to the admin area and go to Plugins > Ad New then search for TDO Mini Forms. The version I started with, V 0.13.5 has a minor bug that doesn't allow you to view or compare submitted edits (you have to either approve or disapprove, but you do get to preview the submission as it is sent via email), and you can't add in Custom Fields for the edit post feature, but everything else works great, especially for the submit a post version of the form. Below is a video overview of the TDO Mini Forms installation, setup and use including a PHP editing tip. Leave a comment or reach out if you have any questions and I'll try to help. The site I am using this on is http://indilean.com so please check the site out and share it with any indie musician friends you might have :)