I’m not sure what a Systemologist does but Warwick has just showcased The Times’ new Multimedia Portal on one of the Automattic blogs and you can read the full post here.

If you’ve never heard of this plugin before here’s a quick excerpt detailing what the plugin is all about.

The TimesURL Sociable Plugin for WordPress gives visitors the ability to shorten urls, email, and share pages they find on your website. It works by adding icon images below each of your blog posts that, when clicked, sends your blog post details to a range of South African and International social bookmarking websites.

The plugin has matured somewhat and this important update forms part of a new structure which we’ve implemented to work with the WordPress plugin directory.

While there was an automatic update function in this plugin what I found was that WordPress’ built-in plugin update notifications only work with plugins that are contained within the WordPress plugin directory.

Version 1.3 is now compatible for use with the plugin directory and I urge anyone using this plugin to upgrade as soon as possible so that you can be notified as soon as newer versions of the plugin are available. Detailed upgrade instructions are contained within the readme.txt file.

I’ve also added a couple more South African sites for you to chose from.

The main idea behind it was to incorporate TimesURL in an easy to use plugin for WordPress but in the end I decided that we don’t have a current, updated plugin for social bookmarks in South Africa and hence this plugin was born.

It is based on Peter Harkins’ Sociable plugin but because Peter’s plugin is so great I decided that I’d only include the following sites and make it more local by only including popular sites used by South Africans.

• TimesURL
• Muti
• Facebook
• Google Bookmarks
• StumbleUpon
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Reddit
• Technorati

You an read all about the usage of the plugin on this page and once the plugin is activated in WordPress you’ll see the following below each of your blog posts.

The plugin has been tested to work on WordPress 2.0.11 as well as 2.3.2 and if you’re using WordPress 2.3 then you won’t have to worry about checking for upgrades as WordPress will notify you when a newer version of the plugin is available.

Because it’s a South African plugin I’d like it to be the definitive social bookmark plugin for this country. If I’ve missed any sites out please let me know.

As with any WordPress upgrade in the past the process was as simple as uploading the files and running the 1-Step upgrade script. Simple, easy and fast.

From the WordPress Development Blog site I’ll highlight a few of the newest changes in version 2.1:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.