I have posted details of my publications on this site. More interestingly, I did so with a plugin and theme extension which builds on previous work on presenting publications in WordPress and using WordPress as a semantic platform. These are useful steps towards WordPress as a lightweight repository.

Publications as custom post types and metadata

The approach rests heavily on custom post types, one for each publication type. And for each post type there are custom metadata boxes that correspond to the schema.org properties that are important for that type of publication. As an added factor, some of the schema.org properties expect values which are entities rather than literals (i.e. Things not Strings). So there are custom post types for these entity types, namely People (the authors) and Organizations (publishers).

Output and theme extension

For each custom post type and associated metadata there are helper functions which can be called in the theme to output the data wrapped in suitable HTML. This output includes the schema.org properties embedded as RDFa. So, if you look at one of the publication pages through an RDFa enabled tool (such as Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool) you will extract all the metadata for that chapter. (Note: in this case you’ll also get information about this blog put there by SEO plugins I use).

I also created a single archive for all the publication custom post types. This I did pretty much as outlined before. As noted, that code would give all the custom post types with an archive the same archive. That’s not what I want,  so I registered the publication custom post types with a tag of my own

'pubwp_type' => 'publication'

and added this to the query to build the loop for the publications archive:

 
$cpargs = array('_builtin' => False,   
               'exclude_from_search' => False,   
               'pubwp_type' => 'publication'); 
$publication_post_types = get_post_types( $cpargs, 'names', 'and' );
$args = array(
	'post_type' => $publication_post_types,
	'posts_per_page' => -1
);
$publications = new WP_Query( $args );

Next steps

I would like to make the display of the archive more flexible, so it can be filtered and ordered by any parameter that makes sense (date, author, type, topic). Also I should integrate it better with the rest of the blog, so that publication types show up in general archives and searches.

Beyond my own publication list, I can see this approach being useful for disseminating information different types of resource, e.g. OERs, so I would like to make it easier to create new post types, with associated properties and helper functions.