Posts tagged ‘plugin’

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December 28, 2010, 2:50 pm

Sorry for the several updates over the last day. Somebody pointed out that I hadn’t pushed a new version of SFC in several months, and that the fixes in trunk had gotten a ways ahead of those in the released version. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually go and test properly, so versions 0.22 and 0.23 had minor but critical bugs in them. Version 0.24 should push shortly with the fixes for those bugs as well as the enhancements over the last several months.

A short list of the changes/fixes:

  • Thanks to Burak Tuyan, the whole plugin is now more i18n capable, for people who want to translate it.
  • Added an sfc_img_exclude filter, to let others add their own image classes to exclude from the automatic image finder for share and publish and such.
  • The sfc_like_button() functions now supports a url parameter to add a like button to a specific URL.
  • A couple of patches by Jamie Zawinski: Publish now sends up to 1000 chars from the post to Facebook.
  • Also thanks to jwz, publish now gets images correctly in more cases.
  • If you enable login avatars (by uncommenting that code), it will show them for comments now too.
  • Eliminated deprecated calls to Facebook functions (xid and register users calls)
  • Custom Post Type support for automatic publishing (any CPT with public=>true will get auto-published).
  • Custom Post Type support for manual publishing (any CPT with public=>true will show the meta box in its edit screen).
  • Contextual help added to SFC Settings page.
  • Improved error messages
  • Numerous other minor optimizations and bugfixes

Version 1.0, which will ditch the old Connect code entirely, isn’t quite ready yet. The new registration stuff will be in there though, eventually. It will probably be after I get back from the core developers meeting though. Sorry for the excessive delay on that. I know lots of people want it, I never seem to have the time. I’ll try to find the time and finish it up soon. Really.

Note to users: If you got the “Breaking change: API deprecations” email from Facebook today, then you are probably using the SFC-Login plugin, or have at some point. Version 0.24 removes the code they are deprecating from the SFC-Login plugin. So upgrade and you’ll be fine. However, note that SFC is no longer compatible with WordPress versions prior to 3.0. Upgrade WordPress to 3.0 or later before upgrading SFC.

Note to international users: And with all that, there’s still a bug. If you’re seeing weird characters in your FB Published posts, edit the sfc-publish.php file. On line 179 you’ll find return utf8_encode($text);. Change it to return $text; to fix the problem with the double encoded characters. The next version will have this fix as well, but I didn’t think it was major enough to push a whole new version right away.

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Category: Code  |  55 Comments

October 6, 2010, 4:56 pm

Update: Forget this plugin. Go install Jetpack instead.

WordPress.com rolled out a nifty new feature called “Gravatar Hovercards” today. Basically it changes gravatar images into popups showing more info when the user hovers over them. In the comments, Andy Peatling mentioned bringing them to self-hosted WordPress blogs soon.

I didn’t feel like waiting.

<?php
/* 
Plugin Name: Gravatar Hovercards
*/
function gravatar_hovercards() {
	wp_enqueue_script( 'gprofiles', 'http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js', array( 'jquery' ), 'e', true );
}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts','gravatar_hovercards');

This is not official.
It’s not supported.
It may not even work for you.
It certainly won’t work if they change things.

Still, this blog is about fun things I do with WordPress, so I saw no reason not to post it. I expect they’ll come out with their own plugin soon, but I’d be rather surprised if it’s much more than this. Maybe some extra options or something. I dunno. Switch to that script when it comes out.

But for those people who like experimenting and playing with WordPress on the edge, here you go.

And for you Javascript inclined people, take a look at their code. It’s got some tricks in it that are pretty neat.

Enjoy. 🙂

(Updated as per several comments)

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Category: Code, WordPress  |  52 Comments

September 24, 2010, 3:03 pm

I recently acquired a short domain name, otto42.com (the otto.com domain is owned by a German company, and I use Otto42 as my alias a lot on sites as “Otto” is usually already taken). So I decided to use it to make my own URL shortener.

I looked at various methods for this, including simply writing my own (honestly, it ain’t that hard), but I wanted to see what was already available first.

First thing I looked at was the shortlinks system built into Google Apps. I’ve used it before, and it’s fairly nifty. They even have an API available for interfacing it to other things. And hey, the redirections would be served up by Google’s servers, which you can’t beat for reliability. Sadly, after screwing around with this for a while, and trying out some example code, I was totally unable to get their API to work. The whole thing is written in Python, which I have an intense dislike of (whitespace my ass!), and when trying to access the thing via direct calls, it gave me nothing but errors and annoyances.

So I searched around a bit more, and was relegated to building my own, when a tweet by @ozh mentioned that he’d put a blog up on yourls.org. This looked promising, as I know Ozh is active in WordPress, and so of course it would have a plugin. After investigating, I went with it. It works pretty well, actually.

How to do it

First thing I did was to point my short domain at a directory on my hosting account. If it’s going to run code, it needs to have a place to do it from. So I made a yourls directory and pointed the domain to it using my hosting control panel.

Next, I grabbed a copy of the yourls code and installed it there. 300+ files to FTP? Yikes. Complex. A quick bit of reading told me that it needed a database and a config file. Very similar to WordPress in this respect, except the config file resides in the includes subdirectory for some reason. Not so obvious, but whatever.

I toyed with the idea of using the same database for yourls that I already use for WordPress, but ended up creating another one for it. I’m now thinking that it might be worth merging them though, as that way, VaultPress would probably back up the yourls tables too.

After some hosting weirdness, the thing was up and running.

Plugin

Installing the WordPress plugin is a snap. Just find it in the Add New Plugin interface and hit install. After Network Activating it for all my sites, I went to configure it. I had to configure it on each site separately, but no big deal.

Configuration is fairly straightforward. Tell it URL of the API interface, give it my username and password, and voila. Worked first try.

There’s a bunch of Twitter stuff there as well which I only set up to make it stop bothering me about it. I don’t want this plugin to send out my tweets on new posts, as I already use my own Simple Twitter Connect for that. Still, it bugs you with an error message if you don’t set it up, so I did. Thankfully, there’s checkboxes to turn the autotweeting on and off, so I just leave these turned off. Honestly, I think this whole Twitter thing should be removed from the plugin, but I can understand the “easy” factor here for new users. Making them totally optional would be a nice enhancement though.

At first, I was confused because when I turned it on, I saw no way to make it back-populate my old posts into the shortener. Turns out I didn’t need to, it started doing it all by itself shortly afterwards. I think it actually does shortening on an on-demand basis, creating a shortlink whenever there isn’t one already there for a post.

The plugin also hooks into the Shortlink API, meaning that my Twitter plugin will automagically use the new shortlink. You can see that the shortlink box below this post has the otto42.com shortlink in it. I had to make zero changes to make that work. Isn’t interoperability fun?

One other thing I did have to do was to turn off the old wp.me shortlinks I used. These are provided by the WordPress.com Stats plugin, and there’s a checkbox in its options page to turn them off. No big deal.

Final thought

So yeah, if you have a short domain and want to make your own shortlinks, then YOURLS is a pretty good choice. I haven’t played with the stats gathering part of it yet, for the simple reason that I only just turned it on and thus have no stats to view. Still very easy to do, on the whole. Of course, if it could be entirely a WordPress plugin, then I might think it much cooler. 🙂

Update: There is a minor problem in the way the YOURLS plugin handles the WP Shortlink API. I’ve reported it upstream, hopefully it can be fixed soon. Still, it’s a minor issue. The workaround for now is to call wp_get_shortlink(get_the_ID()) when you want to get the shortlink for a post inside the Loop.

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Category: Code, Other, WordPress  |  30 Comments

April 30, 2010, 11:32 am

For those of you helping me with testing out SFC trunk, there’s a new one in there for you.

[fb-activity]

The activity feed widget is one of Facebook’s recent addition to their social widgets. Basically, it shows who’s liked and shared your posts recently. The idea is to encourage liking, I suppose.

The latest plugin adds this to WordPress as a sidebar widget, as a shortcode (fb-activity), and enables it for direct theme usage with the sfc_activity_feed() function.

As always, this is trunk beta code here, so if you do use it, don’t expect it to be 100% yet. Still, it works well enough. 🙂

Get it here: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/simple-facebook-connect/trunk/.

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Category: Code, Other  |  1 Comment

April 15, 2010, 10:18 am

Took a look at @anywhere a little while ago. With my experience working with the Facebook javascript methods, it was rather trivial to incorporate the new javascript functionality from Twitter into Simple Twitter Connect, so that was exactly what I did.

Simple Twitter Connect 0.7 now automatically enables your site to run the new @anywhere code. With zero extra configuration steps.

All the example javascript code they give on the @anywhere documentation site will work immediately.

I even added an example plugin (STC-Linkify) to demonstrate how it works. Activate that plugin and it will automatically link any Twitter usernames on your page to Twitter. So when I type @ottodestruct or @otto42, they’re automatically linked. Neat, eh?

I’ll be adding several more @anywhere plugins to the package soon, but those will be in the next update. If you want them in advance, then you can see the trunk version of the plugin and pick and choose which you want. I’ve already added the Follow Button widget to there, so you can go get it now if you like. I’m already using it here in my sidebar. 🙂

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Category: Code, WordPress  |  3 Comments

April 13, 2010, 1:18 pm


I’m working on a Simple Google Connect for the future. But for now, here’s a simple Buzz Button using the functionality they announced today.

sgc-buzz.php

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: SGC - Buzz Button  
Plugin URI: http://ottopress.com/wordpress-plugins/simple-google-connect
Description: Adds a Google Buzz button to your content.
Author: Otto
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://ottodestruct.com
License: GPL2

    Copyright 2010  Samuel Wood  (email : otto@ottodestruct.com)

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, 
    as published by the Free Software Foundation. 
    
    You may NOT assume that you can use any other version of the GPL.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.
    
    The license for this software can likely be found here: 
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
    
*/

wp_enqueue_script( 'google-buzz-button', 'http://www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js', array(), '1', true );

/**
 * Simple GB button
 *
 * @param int $post_id An optional post ID.
 */
function get_buzz_button($id = 0) {
	$url = get_permalink($id);
	$out = '<a title="Post on Google Buzz" class="google-buzz-button" href="http://www.google.com/buzz/post" data-button-style="normal-count" data-url="';
	$out .= $url;
	$out .= '"></a>';
	return $out;
}

function buzz_button($source = '', $id = 0) {
	echo get_buzz_button($id);
}

/**
 * Simple buzz button as a shortcode
 *
 * Example use: buzz id="123"
 */
function buzz_button_shortcode($atts) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'id' => 0,
	), $atts));
	return get_buzz_button($id);
}

add_shortcode('buzz', 'buzz_button_shortcode');

function buzz_button_automatic($content) {
	$button = get_buzz_button();
	$content = $content . $button;
	return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'buzz_button_automatic', 30);
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Category: Code, WordPress  |  3 Comments

April 1, 2010, 11:25 am

Over on my Simple Facebook Connect page, there’s lots of comments from users with problems. Having answered these for a while now, via there and via email, I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t search for answers to their problems.

The “How to fix the Email Domain” problem is answered on that one page no less than 6 times, for example. Almost all the rest of the problems given come from the “wrong connect URL setup” issue.

So if you don’t want to do support all the time, I think you have to make your plugin smarter. Take the most common issues you see and make the plugin auto-detect the problems. That’s what I’ve done with SFC version 0.16, for example.

Error Messages

Error messages now show up when the user configured something wrong on Facebook.

The plugin now can detect these two major causes of problems and will display an error message. It also provides a link to the right place on Facebook to go and correct these problems. It can’t actually fix the problems directly (though that is possible… small steps), but I hope this will eliminate the need for me to continually have to answer the same questions over and over again.

So my tip for the day for plugin programmers: For robustness, make your plugin check for commonplace issues. And the issues that you think will be commonplace may not be the ones you expect, so figure on having to add more and more checks every time.

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Category: Rants, WordPress  |  8 Comments

March 17, 2010, 12:07 pm

Too often I see themes missing the absolute minimum requirements to make the theme actually work properly. So I figured I’d make a list of things that ALL WordPress themes need to have in them, every time. These are WordPress theme-specific things. I’m not including obvious stuff like HTML and such.

Note: These are my opinions. You may not agree with every one of these. My opinion in that case is that you’re wrong, so there’s little point in arguing with me unless you have a rock-solid reason for disagreeing with me. In other words, I’m not trying to start a flame war, nor am I interested in one. This is just a checklist that I hope theme authors will start following more often. It would make me happy if all themes had these. 🙂

  • wp_head() in the HEAD section.
  • wp_footer() just before the /BODY tag. (So many themes forget this simple little thing…)
  • language_attributes() in the opening HTML tag.
  • body_class() in the BODY tag.
  • post_class() in whatever surrounds each individual post (probably a DIV).
  • Use of get_header(), get_sidebar, and get_footer inside every appropriate page template.
  • The Loop inside every page template (exception: very Custom Page Templates).
  • Proper use of widgets on the sidebars (dynamic_sidebar, register_sidebar, etc).
  • A special image.php template. Image attachments can have their own template and make theme’s have built in nice gallery-like support. You should make a special one of these to fit your layout.
  • Comments must use wp_list_comments(). Preferably without using a customized callback. But if you must make a callback, be sure to support threading properly! This is tricky without also having an end-callback. And you should use a List to do it (unordered or ordered, it doesn’t really matter). If you’re using DIVs, you’re doing it wrong.
  • The Comments Reply form should have id=”commentform”. If you change this, you’re breaking plugins.
  • Similarly, you need to include do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); on your comment form too.
  • A couple of useful Custom Page templates. Like a no-sidebar one, or one that has a different number of columns. Just generic ones to let your user have a few built in options.
  • New to 2.9: Thumbnail support. Come on, this is cool stuff, every theme needs to have it.
  • New to 3.0: Forget doing your own comment form at all. Just make the call to comment_form(). Then adjust it through styling or filters or what have you. Plugin authors will love you for doing this.
  • New to 3.0: Nav-menu support. It’s cool. Your users will love you for supporting it.
  • New to 3.0: add_theme_support( ‘automatic-feed-links’ ); in the function.php. This will make it do the feed links in the head for you, automagically.

This list is by no means complete. It’s just off the top of my head for now. But honestly, too many themes don’t have even the basic ones, and I’d like to see that fixed. If you’re a theme author, help everybody out, let’s make a list of standards and adhere to them. Users hate editing their themes to support their favorite plugins, and with standards like these, we could make it so that they didn’t have to.

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Category: Rants, WordPress  |  5 Comments

February 9, 2010, 4:22 pm

Originally published here: http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2010/dont-include-wp-load-please/

Note: There is a followup post to this one, which details an even better way than the two given below: http://ottopress.com/2010/passing-parameters-from-php-to-javascripts-in-plugins/

Time for Otto’s general griping: WordPress plugin programming edition.

Here’s a practice I see in plugins far too often:

  1. Plugin.php file adds something like this to the wp_head: 
    <script src='http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/script.js.php'>
  2. Script.js.php has code like the following: 
    <?php
include "../../../wp-load.php";
?>
... javascript code ...

The reason for this sort of thing is that there’s some option or code or something that the javascript needs from the database or from WordPress or whatever. This PHP file is, basically, generating the javascript on the fly.

Usually, the case for this turns out to be something minor. The code needs the value from an option, or some flag to turn it on or off. Or whatever.

Problem is that finding wp-load.php can be a bit of a chore. I’ve seen extreme efforts to find and load that file in plugins before, including searching for it, examining the directory structure to make decent guesses, etc. This sort of thing has existed even before wp-load.php came around, with people trying to load wp-config.php themselves and such.

But the real problem is simpler: This is always the wrong way to do it.
Continue reading ‘Don’t include wp-load, please.’ »

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Category: Code, Rants, WordPress  |  57 Comments
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