ALP leverages the powerful WordPress platform to provide an academic labbook/logbook fit for purpose. It's free, open source, and attempts to be minimally invasive on the core WordPress functionality, which should allow you to install additional plugins as you like.

Lots of documentation is provided on the ALP website. Before installing, please read and understand the Development plans in the context of WordPress upgrades section below. It explains how new features in WordPress will be tracked by ALP.

• Allows multiple authors to be assigned to single posts
• Provides change logs for posts and pages with user-defined comments
• Shows list of cross-references made between posts and pages
• Provides TeX block for rendering mathematical markup
• Tracks whether posts have been read or not by logged-in users, and allows users to view a list of unread posts and change the read/unread status of posts
• Adds advanced search capabilities, letting users search for posts by coauthors, categories, tags and dates
• Option to force users to be logged in to view
  • Option to disallow non-logged-in users from making computationally expensive searches
  • Feeds still accessible using HTTP authentication
  • Images still accessible with direct link (not possible to block without server configuration)
  • XML-RPC interface disabled
• Disable trackbacks, which are usually only useful for commercial sites
• Modifies pages to work more like a wiki:
  • Removes authors and dates
  • Displays a table of contents based on page headers (when used with Labbook theme)
  • Shows breadcrumb trail back to home page (when used with Labbook theme)
• Supports custom media (MIME) upload types (when used on a network)
• Optionally changes user roles:
  • Administrator is unchanged
  • Editor is renamed Researcher
  • Author is renamed Intern
  • Contributor is removed
  • Subscriber is unchanged
  • Excluded is added (for keeping ex-users' posts, comments, etc. on record but not giving them access)
• Hides some WordPress branding and news

ALP is intended to be used with the specially created "Labbook" theme, which supports display of multiple authors, edit summaries, cross-references, etc. provided by ALP.

Features:

• Displays multiple authors
• Displays revision history under posts and pages
• Displays breadcrumb trail on pages showing page hierarchy
• Displays table of contents on pages based on page headings
• Provides users sidebar widget showing links to view lists of each authors' posts, including those coauthored
• Provides recent revisions sidebar widget showing recently edited posts and pages
• Shows cross-references (links in the post body) between posts and pages under each post or page
• Allows posts to be set as read or unread
• Supports display of an institute logo and icon
• Provides two menu locations for providing links to site or external pages or URLs
• Provides customisable copyright notice and ability to hide branding
• Responsive to screen size: viewable on mobile, tablet and desktop browsers

WordPress 5.0.0 or newer is required. ALP adds a block to and extends the sidebar of the new editor provided in WordPress 5.

It is desirable, but not required, to use WordPress in multisite mode. This exposes additional options to network administrators to control upload media (MIME) types and custom script paths.

The plugin has only been tested on and only supports PHP 7. You must have the DOM extension installed in order for the page table of contents lists provided by the Labbook theme to work. You also cannot use PHP via CGI if you wish to make the site private but still have syndication feeds available to the user.

Your users should use up-to-date browsers. The Labbook theme uses CSS Grid, which is a web standard only supported in relatively recent browsers (i.e. within the last three years) of the most popular browsers. The browsers that don't support CSS Grid represent only around 5% of global usage as of March 2018. There are very little legitimate reasons to use outdated browsers, and this project is not concerned about losing sales from users running them!

• Clean code: there's an awful lot of terribly written code in the WordPress ecosystem. This plugin attempts to conform to coding standards, and to interfere minimally with the default WordPress behaviour where possible. For some of the more major features, like coauthors, some quiet major modifications are required to core behaviour, which means that ALP may not be compatible with certain other plugins.
• Modular: most/all features can be enabled or disabled, and work independently from each other.

The basic behaviour of ALP is already in place, but the plan is to keep adding useful features as ALP is used by researchers and the developer gets feedback. Please take a look at the project's issue tracker to view, comment on and add your own feature requests for future releases.

The intention is for ALP to track the latest improvements to WordPress and Gutenberg as much as possible. Any feature that is provided by ALP that becomes available in WordPress Core will probably be removed from ALP quite soon after. The author does not have enough time to support many different versions of WordPress, and so the latest release will always be the focus. If a new core WordPress feature is released in the future that does something very similar to what ALP provides, then it is likely that the corresponding ALP feature will be removed. If in order to avoid breaking installations, some maintenance is required, instructions will be provided for system administrators to perform the necessary changes and the ALP release removing the feature will be given a new major version number.

WordPress is in a period of transition: the new Gutenberg editor has introduced a completely different way of writing content. The feature roadmap shows a plan to eventually replace most of the configurable parts of WordPress with Gutenberg-based assets.

Two changes of particular note are:

• The navigation menu and sidebar will probably eventually be converted to use Gutenberg blocks, with existing widgets and menu configurations becoming "legacy" types. The widgets provided by ALP will likely therefore be made into blocks.
• There is a possibility that a table of contents block will become part of the core WordPress block library (see this, this and this). The ALP table of contents block is auto-generated on page load, so it probably won't disrupt too much to use the new block instead.

This plugin was entirely authored by Sean Leavey, but in some cases code was adapted from other GPL licenced plugins. Features from the list of plugins below have inspired features in ALP. Some bug reports and fixes discovered during the making of ALP have also been pushed back to these plugins and WordPress itself: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

Authors: Mohammad Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Automattic, Shepherd Interactive, Mark Jaquith Link: Co-Authors Plus

Some of the code from this plugin has been adapted into ALP, but the main behaviour has been heavily modified to function using the block editor in WordPress 5.

Authors: Adam Silverstein, Helen Hou-Sandí Links: WP-Post-Meta-Revisions and Revision Notes

These plugins inspired parts of the design of ALP's edit summaries feature.

Authors: Inpsyde GmbH Link: Authenticator

The core authentication code, and the feed HTTP authenticator, have been adapted with only a few changes. The special settings page, private feed keys and cookie lifetime setting have been removed.

Author: Nilambar Sharma Link: Simple Life

The look and feel of the Labbook theme recommended for use with ALP has been inspired by Simple Life, but the templates are not based on Simple Life's code, but rather based on boilerplate code provided by Underscores.