Development on a Shoestring

FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin

This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post.  I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t.  It always sounds more confusing than it is.

Here’s the deal.  FriendFeed aggregates your online life (but isn’t lifestreaming), and one of the things it can aggregate is your blog.   People can then comment on this

image

I’m using their PHP library to allow you to pull back these comments, when they’re made on a blog post of yours, so you can display them on your site.

The plugin ads a template tag called <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?>, which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside "the loop" so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.

Unzip the plugin into your plugins folder & activate it.  You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed.  Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save and you’re done with the setup.  All the other settings in there are optional. You then need to place <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> on your template file(s).

One current limitation is that it matches posts based on title, so if you have multiple posts with the same name, you’re going to have issues.  I’m trying to find something else to match on, but it’s difficult because for many people who use FeedBurner the URL that FriendFeed sees from the RSS feed isn’t what’s available from the blog.  It will work if you import multiple blogs into FriendFeed though, as it matches on the blog’s URL.

I’ve tried my best to highlight that these are comments from FriendFeed, so that people don’t get confused as to where the discussion is coming from.  The comments will be distinct from your standard comments section, with a heading stating that they’re from FriendFeed.  See the image below

 image

By default, the comments & likes are hidden on page load, the reader has to click the ’show’ link next to the headline text.  This can be changed in the plugin’s settings page to make them display by default.

Also, the headline text can be customised to say whatever you want, the tokens {comments} & {likes} will be replaced with the number of comments & likes for that post.

The plugin also adds a form at the bottom of the comments so that people can comment on or ‘like’ your post on FriendFeed directly from your blog.  This can be turned off in the settings if you don’t like it.

There is also a default stylesheet included with the plugin, which will make the output of the plugin look much like the image above, rather than 2 unstyled unordered lists.  This is meant as a starting point, please feel free to takes the styles included and modify them as you need to.  The default stylesheet can be turned off in the settings page if you’re not going to need it included.

I would like to express my thanks to Corvida of SheGeeks, who helped me debug this plugin & to the FriendFeed team for being awesome enough to open their data up like this.

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