For anyone who’s game, and especially for anyone who’s been having problems with the FriendFeed Comments plugin, I’ve just checked in a new beta release that you can download.  It’s not available through the WordPress auto-updater yet because it’s not been tested sufficiently.  So if you’d like to help out you can grab it here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/friendfeed-comments.1.6.0beta.zip

There aren’t any major visible changes.  There’s a couple of tidy up changes eg. I removed some inline styles that I should have moved into the default stylesheet, but the major changes are behind the scenes.  Some people were having issues with the plugin not retrieving the information correctly and it seemed to be an issue for people with a large number of posts & comments.  So this new version now stores the data in a custom table on your WordPress database.  This should make things much more efficient and hopefully less error-prone.

If you do install the new update you must deactivate & re-activate the plugin, then go to the settings page & click ‘Save Changes’ before it will work.  If you don’t the table won’t be created and it won’t work.

If you can help out with the beta testing it would be much appreciated.

Currently one of the limitations of using the otherwise great comments service Disqus is that it doesn’t allow you to display trackbacks/pingbacks.  Apparently this will be fixed in a future release of the Disqus WordPress plugin, but for now it’s not working.

The trackbacks you receive are still stored locally in your database, despite them not being displayed, so you can access them. However there isn’t a built-in way to access just the list of trackbacks. Trackbacks are stored as comments in the wp_comments table and are identified by a comment_type of either ‘trackback‘ or ‘pingback‘. (For our purposes here, there’s no real difference between the two. For more info on what the actual difference is, see this page) So, if you wanted to you could write up a bit of PHP that pulled all the trackbacks out of the database & displayed them on your blog, but for a lot of people this is a bit much.

If you look on this page (the FriendFeed Comments Plugin page), you can see a list of the trackbacks that page has received. It’s a very simple list, I’m not displaying the text snippet that usually comes with trackbacks, but that’s just personal preference. If you’d like to be able to display your trackbacks without having to worry about writing code yourself I’ve got a really simple plugin that lets you do this here. The plugin adds 2 functions, get_approved_trackbacks & trackbacks_template.  get_approved_trackbacks takes the post id as an argument and returns a list of the trackbacks that have been approved (moderated) for that post. trackbacks_template is essentially an additional template tag to be used in the same way as comments_template() is used on the single.php template file.

So for example, if you wanted to display the trackbacks before the comments, download & install the plugin. Then open up the single.php template file for your site & find the line <?php comments_template(); ?>. Stick <?php trackbacks_template(); ?> on the line above it. This will display the trackbacks as an unordered list inside a div with the id "trackbackslist" with a h3 heading "Trackbacks" above the list. However if you’d like to style it differently, it will also look for a template file called trackbacks.php in your template folder. If it finds that it will use that to render the trackbacks.  This is what I’m doing here so as to not display the trackback text.  By default the plugin will display that too.

Obviously this is an advanced option, and only for those familiar with HTML & PHP.  For those people, the plugin provides a variable called $trackbacks which is an array of comment objects. The code that I’ve used to display the trackbacks by default is contained in a file called ‘trackbacks.php’ in the plugin folder, which you can copy into your template folder to use as a starting point for styling your own list.

Hopefully Disqus will sort out what it’s going to do with trackbacks, according to Daniel from Disqus it’s coming soon.  I’m pretty happy with their service, they’ve been really responsive to any support requests and they’ve had pretty solid uptime.  The lack of trackbacks isn’t really a big deal to me, but I do like to show who’s discussing my posts. As usual please leave comments / bug reports on the plugin’s page.

I’ve just checked in a new version of the FriendFeed Comments plugin, which you can download here.  If you’ve already got it installed it should be showing up that an update’s available any moment now.

There’s a lot of code tidy ups and debug improvements, but the major change is the addition of the ability to remember your FriendFeed username & API Key when you comment on or like a post.  There’s now a ‘remember’ checkbox under the API Key field (which is now password masked, like it always should have been!).  If you tick that, it will drop a cookie onto your computer which means you don’t have to keep typing in your username & API key for that blog.

An important security note: the cookie doesn’t contain any identifiable information in it.  It just has a hash key value that is used to look up your username & api key in the blog’s database (which is stored in plain text in the blog’s database).  There is no way through the plugin for the site owner to see your API Key, but if they open their database directly, it is possible.  As in any other case, only share your API key with sites that you trust.  If you don’t tick the ‘remember’ box, your username & api key will not be stored anywhere.

As always, try it out here and then give it a go on your site if you like.  Any problems, please let me know.

After the release of the 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer, one of the other changes I noticed was that the blog side panel was now customised for WordPress.  It had a little WordPress icon & it knew where the admin page was located.  This, I discovered, was due to the fact that WLW now has an API for customising this panel with a manifest file. The WordPress.com blogs already have one done for them, with custom buttons to their comments & stats, but I figured, why not the rest of us WordPress users too. 

So I have a very beta plugin that will generate a wlwmanifest file for your blog.  It utilises a lot of the imagery from the WordPress.com one, so I hope they don’t mind.  You can download the plugin here. Here’s the page for it on WordPress.org.

This is very much a case of me working out an idea.  If you have any suggestions for what this can do, please leave a comment.  I’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s all together possible that this may be in the pipeline for the WordPress core, and that would be great.

[inspired by Tim Heuer's subtext version]

I’ve been working on a new version of the verse of the day plugin.  There have been a few reported problems with the verse not updating, and I’ve been wanting to add widget support for ages.  So I’m after a few beta testers.  Doesn’t matter if you’ve installed it before or not, if you want to try it out, you can grab the zip file here.  Extract it into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and try it out.  If you have already installed the plugin, please deactivate it and delete the existing plugin files before installing this beta. If you want to roll back to the earlier version after installing this beta, you can grab the current stable version from here.

If your wanting to use the widget, it should show up automatically in the list of available widgets.  If not, and you haven’t installed it before, you’ll need to add <?php wp_votd(); ?> to your sidebar to make it show up.

Please leave any bug reports and questions in the comments below, or if you’re a member on wp-plugins.org, please create a new ticket, selecting the wp-votd component and assign it to dalziel.

Thanks in advance!

[tags]Verse of the Day, WordPress Plugin, Bible, WordPress[/tags]

Just released the 1.1 version of the Noembedder Plugin, which adds a <noembed> section to any embedded content (e.g. YouTube videos, etc…) containing a customisable message & for YouTube and GameVideos,  a thumbnail of the video.  This is very handy for people reading your site in an RSS reader, as a lot of them don’t display embedded content. Well, FeedDemon 2.5 will, but plenty of the other readers don’t!

This release added the thumbnails for GameVideos & fixed a few bugs.  The major fix was enabling the plugin to work if the embed section didn’t have a closing tag.  That is, if it looked like this <embed src=... /> rather than <embed src=... ></embed>.

You can download the plugin here, and there are more details on the plugin page.  As always, please leave any comments or questions on the plugin page.

[tags]WordPress Plugin, Noembedded, YouTube, GameVideos[/tags]