I’ve been a bit inspired over the last week to do some fairly major updates to the FriendFeed plugin.  Thanks to some helpful suggestions and feedback from a number of people, I’ve added a bunch of new features and fixed some dodgy code that was in the previous versions.

The biggest change is that you can now comment & ‘like’ a post directly from the post itself without having to go to FriendFeed.  This is done using a bit of AJAX (via Prototype). The user puts in their comment, their username & their FriendFeed API key.  The API key is never visible to the site owner, it’s passed directly through to FriendFeed and then discarded.

This form is turned on by default, but can be disabled in the admin section if you don’t like it. Also, because of this change, the plugin will now display on every post, whether there are comments or likes on it or not.

The other changes are:

• You can now edit the ‘headline’ text that displays. ie the "On FriendFeed, this post was liked by x people and commented on y times".  You can now put whatever you want there, and it will replace the tokens {comments} & {likes} with the number of comments & likes.
• A default stylesheet is now included, to get you started on styling the plugin’s content.  It also can be disabled in the admin page, and you can see what the stylesheet looks like here.
• The plugin can now be set to have the FriendFeed comments & likes be visible by default.  Currently the default is to hide them and only show them when the user clicks the ’show’ link.
• Also, based on the points I made in my post about self-cleaning WordPress plugins, the admin page now has a ‘delete plugin’ button.  This is will remove all trace of the plugin from the WordPress database, so you can then deactivate the plugin knowing it hasn’t left anything behind.  Needless to say, only use this if you want to completely remove the plugin, not just disable it temporarily.
• Numerous bug fixes & tidy-ups.  I’ve replaced my bespoke javascript to hide/show the comments with Prototype too.

So, if it hasn’t already turned up in the Automatic Updates list, grab the new version from here.  As always please let me know what you think & how it can be better.