Bible Verse of the Day WordPress Plugin
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV)
This is a plugin for the WordPress blogging software (which powers this site). It allows WordPress users to display a bible verse of the day
on their site. Please read this page before leaving any questions/comments
Any version of this plugin past 2.6 requires WordPress 2.1, so if you haven’t installed WordPress 2.1 yet (and don’t intend to) please use the 2.6 version of this plugin. It is stable & functional, just no longer supported.
Installation
Download the plugin zip file (Download link is under ‘Plugin Information’). Unzip the files & place them in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory on your site. Enable the plugin on the Plugins page in the WordPress Admin, then go into the plugin options page, set the options you want and click ‘Update’. (You only have to do this if you’re changing any options, the plugin loads the default settings automatically). That’s it, the plugin is installed. Easy. Almost … too easy.
Using the plugin (aka How do I make the thing actually show up?
)
Like many other plugins, this plugin creates another tag that you can put into your template somewhere. If you’re familiar with editing your site’s templates, then all you need to know is to put <?php wp_votd(); ?> somewhere on one of your template files. Usually it gets put on the sidebar, but you’re welcome to put it wherever you want. Inventive displays of creativity with the display of the VotD plugin will be highlighted here if you let me know about it.
Update in version 2.6: I have added support for the Hemingway theme’s block system, see below.
I have not ported support for Hemingway blocks to 3.0. This is because I’m planning to update it for the WordPress Widgets in the next release.
If you’re not familiar with editing your templates, instructions on how to are beyond the scope of this document, but there are plenty of great instructions and ideas on the WordPress Codex. But in short, what you should do to get started very quickly is to go into the Admin section of your blog, click on ‘Presentation’ on the menu, then ‘Theme Editor’ on the sub-menu. From there you are presented with a list of files on the right-hand side. This files are your site’s templates. I’m going to assume that if you don’t know how to edit your templates you’re still using the default template. Clilck on the sidebar.php link to bring up the code for the sidebar. At the top you’ll see
<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
After that add a new line and put this in:
<li><?php wp_votd(); ?></li>
Hit ‘Update File’ down the bottom and that’s it. If you view your site now, you should see the verse at the top of the sidebar. This may not work, however, if your server isn’t setup to allow you to edit files through the website. If on pressing ‘Edit File’ it presents you with an error message you’re going to have to edit the files manually with an FTP & text editor program. If that’s all geek to you, you’ll probably need to get some help from someone else to set this up.
Options
The plugin has a number of different options, which are set using the ‘Verse of the Day’ options page. You can select a different bible version from the dropdown list, or enter the details of any other VotD RSS feed you like. You just need to enter the version abbreviation (eg. ‘ESV’), the name of the version (eg. ‘English Standard Version’) and the URL of the RSS feed (eg. http://www.blablabh.com/rss.xml).
You can change the refresh time. Don’t though, it is a verse of the day after all. The only reason you’d use that is if you were testing something. You don’t even need to change this when you change the bible version, as it will automatically clear the cache and update for you.
You can change the display template. This is basically the code that the plugin outputs. It should be fairly self-explanitory to anyone with a passing knowlege of HTML. There are instructions on the options page explaing what the different tags display (eg. [TEXT] is where the text of the verse will display).
Technical Information
The plugin uses the magpie-rss php module that is built into WordPress to pull down the RSS VotD feed from sites like Good New Publishers (The English Standard Version) or BibleGateway (NIV, KJV, etc.). The plugin stores the verse information from the RSS feed in the WordPress options table along with a timestamp, so it knows when to update again. The user can set the plugin to update more regularly than every 24 hours but this is not reccomended, as it is a verse of the day, so the content won’t change any more regularly. If the user sets the update time to 0 a warning notice is set in the options page letting the user know that this is a Very Bad Thing™
Previous versions of this plugin used a text file stored in the /wp-contents/ folder to hold the cache, but I found that far too many users were having problems with saving and retriving the cache file, mostly due to permissions problems (and hosting companies not allowing users shell access to set said permissions), so I decided to move it into the database. In doing so I found that WordPress makes DB access so redicullously simple I don’t know why I didn’t do it that way in the fist place. Pass set_options() 2 variables (a name and value pair) and it stores the value referenced by the name in the options table, and get_options() function retrieves the value. Pass set_options() an array as a value and it will serialize() it for you automagically (and get_options() will unserialize() too). So great.
Anyway, enough fanboy raving. The other major change was to create an options page rather than making the users set the variables in the code as paramaters on the wp_votd() function.
80 Responses for "Bible Verse of the Day WordPress Plugin"
[...] * WP-Verse Of The Day: Verse of the Day is een plugin die dagelijks een ander Bijbelvers weergeeft…. [...]
[...] And so the time has come to start configuring WordPress … my blogging tool. I’ve spend the best part of two hours searching for plugins for my site. Came up with three of them. Verse of the Day, Email and Print. [...]
[...] Verse of the Day plugin has now been activated. Besides my heart, His Word shall also reside in the front page. Thanks go out to Dalziel of Development on a Shoestring for such an important and neat plugin. May God’s Word soothes the soul and imparts wisdom to all that take heed. [...]
Hi, great work! In Wordpress 2 (using connections template and trying to put the function in the comments.php file in the theme directory), I just get nothing back from the function call. Any ideas?
Have to clicked ‘Update’ on the options page. The plugin won’t display until you have confirmed the selected options at least once, even if you’re not changing anything.
Wonderful plug-in! It’s so encouraging to see God’s Holy Word proclaimed throughout the world in new ways! Keep up the good work and be encouraged!
[...] 1) Verse of the Day. Developed to insert a daily bible verse into your sidebar, I modified it to provide a link to Chabad’s Daily Thought. [...]
i’m running wordpress 1.5 and when i add the plugin to my directory i get this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: plugin_basename() in /home/rmfoblog/public_html/cozart/wp-content/plugins/wp-votd.php on line 32
cozart: sorry In the latest updates I’ve used WP2.0 functions. You can either upgrade to 2.0, or the earlier version of the plugin should still work in 1.5 http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/wp-votd/tags/2.5/wp-votd.zip?rev=5257&format=raw
[...] I added the VotD plugin as I thought it was a good little ‘bite’ of information that people can get every day. Now even if you aren’t Christian the Bible teaches good values so I feel this will benefit every visitor to the blog. [...]
[...] Verse of the Day [...]
Are there any plans to make this a widget?
I am really struggling to get it formatted so that it looks like the rest of the items in my sidebar. If it were a widget I wouldn’t have this problem, would I?
Even if you don’t make it available as a widget I think it is really cool!
Jackie: It’s definitely on my todo list!
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I’m wondering if it is possible to use your plugin to display random items from the jargon database. They have a feed for that here:
http://www.jargondb.org/random/rss.xml
Thanks
There’s no reason why you can’t, all it’s doing is parsing the RSS feed & outputing the contents, you can change the formatting to remove references to verse & call it whatever you want.
If you get it to work, please drop us a line so I can check it out.
Hi,
I’ve activated the plugin, inserted the required code into my sidbar, updated and all that but it isn’t showing up! Any tips on what I could be doing wrong?
Thanks for the nice plugin and clear instructions. My sister died last week and I just now put up a page for persons to leave comments for my family. The first verse that was “randomly” fed to my site was 1 John 2:24-25 “…abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us–eternal life.” God is so good!
Glenn-
Like several other, I’m not able to get this to work either in my wordpress blog. I do have the plugin activated so that is not the issue and I have the simple line of code in the right spot of my sidebar.php file.
Are there any dependancies that the plugin requires? The only other plugin that I have activated is “Dashbar”.
PROBLEM RESOLVED
Glenn -
I think I found the reason that I and perhaps others have not been able to see anything on their pages after following the above instructions. It appears that if you never visit the “Options” / “Verse of the Day” page under the Word Press admin menu, the verse won’t display. After I just went to the page for the first time, my VOTD started to show up on my blog. I’m guessing that something must get written somewhere by visiting that page to configure the plug-in.
So if your having the VOTD not show up, try going to that options page and then check again.
Dirk, very true, if you note this comment you’ll see others have had this problem before. I’ve now added those instructions to the installation section in the post above. I probably should have put that in earlier, I guess I just assumed people would do it any way. Silly me
“Dirk, very true, if you note this comment you’ll see others have had this problem before.”
Funny, I read that post and assumed something completely different … must have been reading too fast. Serves me right. Thanks for the quick response.
Well, I have gone through each of the above and its still not working. I have updated the options mutiple times. I have checked that I have the latest 2.6 release of votd. I am using yellowhite3c as the theme and I have update the leftsidebar.php to have in it. I have updated this leftsidebar.php before and see the changes (the del.icio.us tag) so I know changes work.
I am the end of what I think I can do.
Any help is requested….
John
[...] Verse of the day takes the verse from various RSS bible verse feeds and incorporates into the wordpress site. It can be placed anywhere and changes each day. It caches the verse so that the feed is only read once every 24 hours. [...]
[...] - Verse of the Day: muestra un verso de la BÃblia al dÃa. ¡Guau! [...]
[...] Bible Verse of the Day fetches the daily verse from Good New Publishers (The English Standard Version) or BibleGateway (NIV, KJV, etc.). [...]
Nice Plugin. I never thought there would be a plugin like this. I use a script from verseoftheday.com
Anyone know of an RSS Feed for the NASB? All I can find is the ASV.
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Tony: unfortunately it seems that the NASB publishers don’t let verse of the day feeds be published: http://www.biblegateway.com/usage/votd/rss/votd.rdf?49
[...] Bible Verse of the Day fetches the daily verse from Good New Publishers (The English Standard Version) or BibleGateway (NIV, KJV, etc.). [...]
Thanks for your work on this plugin. I have one question. I cannot get the end of the feed to look right. This is how it looks on my page.
live by faith.” (
Romans 1:16-17
, ESV) (
Listen
)
I widened the sidebar and that did not fi it….Forgive my ignorance.
There’s a problem with the stylesheet on that page. I’ve emailed you a possible fix.
Excellent plugin! I put it up at http://deliciousasianfood.com
Thanks for the info on the NASB. Great plugin, BTW.
How do i change the color of the font?
FOUND THE ANSWER ON YOUR SITE!!:D
Jackie, the best way to control the font is to use CSS. If you’re not familiar with CSS you should probably have a look here and here.
But in short, the verse text is contained inside a HTML paragraph element with an id of ‘votd’. What this means is that if you open up your css document (in your case it’s wp-content/themes/ocadia/style.css) and go to the bottom of the file and insert the following:
#votd {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: red;
}
it will make the VotD text 12 pixels in size, in the Verdana font and coloured red. You’ll probably want to style it somewhat different to that though
Glad to hear it all worked the way it’s supposed to!
how do you change the bible version?
i’ve tried wp_votd(’NIV’); but it still displays the ESV version.
Thanks!
John, there is an options page for the plugin where you can set the version. Go to wp-admin -> Options -> Verse of the Day & pick from the list there. The NIV is one of the options.
thanks for the plugin. it’s awesome. love it.
This is wonderful. Thank you so much!
thanks for the plugin but after I activate the plugin, I have problem to load the import page under manage in wp-admin. when I want to import my post from my other blog to simplyvie, I can’t load the import page. if I deactivate votd plugin.. then the import page loading successfully. well I think that’s all from me.
I love this plug-in! But what I appreciated most of all were your great install instructions. Thanks so much!
Hi there, Can the listen option be removed?
http://cfnb.morningstarmedia.org/wordpress
I’m using the Anarchy Media Player plugin, and it makes this kinda weird…
I’d really rather just have the text anyway…
Thanks and GodsPeace!
Yep, if you go into the options page for the Plugin in admin and remove [ENCLOSURE] from the Display Template, it won’t show the listen link any more.
Cheers
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Great Plug-in. Thanks for putting the time into it for us to share the Word!
i seem to be having trouble. the verse never changes, it stays on the same one, unless i click update in options.
[...] Plugins: Bible Verse of the Day, Our Todo List & Share This 1.4 adobe photoshop, amd 64, gimp, gpl, Microsoft, mpl, nvu, [...]
Thanks for the plugin. It’s very useful.
I have one question. The plugin is showing alright on my website(I’m using WP 2.1.3) but it won’t refresh. The same verse is staying for few days and every time I have to go to the option page and click the ‘update’ manually for it to refresh. Does anyone have the same problem?
Thanks in advance.
erin & anthony: Can you tell me, what version of WordPress are you running? Also, are you running version 3.0 of the plugin?
I’m using wordpress 2.1.3 and version 3.0 of the plugin.
I am having the same problem as erin and anthony. The verse isn’t refreshing. I am also using wordpress 2.1.3 and version 3.0 of the plugin. Any help with this would be great! Love the plugin!
Erin, Anthony & Rachel, there is a new beta version of the plugin available http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/2007/05/28/new-beta-of-the-verse-of-the-day-plugin-now-with-widgets/
I’m hoping that it will solve this problem
Hi there,
I use your plugin at http://www.ucb.com/blog/ i have a problem though… the font sizes are too small.
here are my questions:
1. what can i do to solve this? I am a newbie on this… so if you can guide me what to do and how to do it i will appreciate it.
2. i accidentally deleted the text in the configuration box… all i have now there is “[TEXT]” could you please give me again the default values again please?
thanks,
Jim
I think i have tweaked it and it partly worked… have a looksie at http://www.ucb.com/blog/
My problem now is that the text isn’t in the box… or overflows out of the box… you’d know what i mean when you see it…
is there anything i can do to make it work “in” the box?
-Jim
Jim, I’m not seeing the verse at all I guess you’re working on it at the moment, but if it’s not contained then I would guess there is a CSS problem. It does appear that the calendar is pushing out of its box & above.
Hey Glenn! Any progress on a version that works for Wordpress Widgets?
That would, indeed, be awesome.
Hunter, I’ve got a beta version available now, you can grab it here: http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/2007/05/28/new-beta-of-the-verse-of-the-day-plugin-now-with-widgets/
Please let me know how it goes
awesome! trying it out now…
Hi,
A few days ago I installed the plugin. I really like it, but it doesn’t refresh. Even since I installed the new beta version 3.5 it won’t refresh.
Any help is welcome.
Thanks
Glenn, the beta version works wonderfully on my side. Thanks so much!
[...] Bible Verse of the Day Wie der Title des Plugins schon verrät, kann man mit dieser Zusatzfunktion einen täglich wechselnden Bibelvers auf seinem Blog einblenden. [...]
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I have a “high-speed” problem with th MP3 playback… on the following site:
http://cfnb.morningstarmedia.org/wordpress/news/
any ideas? How do I just remove the MP3 playback altogether?
Thanks!
I can’t get this to work at all. It looks like a great plug-in and I’ve tried everything I can but I’m at a loss. I can’t even get it to show a “Display Output within the plug-in options page. The three version customization forms are all populated with the following by default:
and any time I try to change them they automatically revert back to the above. Ideally I would like to use this as a widget but I can’t even get it to show up as a plug-in. I have tried various themes. The actual widget shows up with the title but not the text. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Sorry. My previous post took away my code so I just uploaded a screenshot to my server it’s located here:
http://www.soulsdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/picture-2.png
Again, any help would be greatly appreciated.
[...] Verse of the Day [...]
Hey thanks for the plugin
thanks for putting the word to wordpress!
…but doesn’t refresh each day (using wp-votd 3.0 widget with worpress 2.2.1)
Glenn,
I am having a problem getting VOTD plugin 3.5 to display correctly on two sites. If you check http://www.pitchfords.com and http://www.hardteaching.com you will see that for some reason it displays with line breaks.
I haven’t changed the display template.
It displays fine on http://www.andrewpitchford.com
Any ideas?
Andrew
thanks for having this plugin available to everyone! this is definitely in my to-do-list.
Will let you know if it will work on my site. THanks!
Hi. No matter how hard I try this isn’t displaying anywhere in my WP website. I am using WP 2.0.4 and plugin 2.6. I am using Firefox - does that have any affect?
Thanks.
Forget it. I’m crazy. It works now.
Got the beta and installed as a widget- I do get the VOTD title showing up in the sidebar, however no votd…..
Do you know of a way to only add the verse of the day widget to only one page. If you look at my blog - http://members.thebabyattic.com, the you will see that I have a nav bar at the top with my pages, and one of those pages is “Word for Wednesday” that’s where I want the verse of the day to appear - on the page, not the sidebar (or if it has to stay on the sidebar, then I only want it on this page’s sidebar). I have no idea how to make that happen? Any ideas?? I love the plugin!
Ok, Ifigured out how to get i on just on page - but the now I would like to increase the font size. I’mnot sure how.
http://members.thebabyattic.com/?page_id=14/ it’s on the top left sidebar
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I love the subject of life verses. They are each so personal. Mine is…
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. Proverbs 3:5-6
I also wanted to show you my website http://www.MyCrossVerse.com. I’m an artist living in Texas and I do custom Christian paintings for the good of His kingdom. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.
God Bless