WordPress Plugins

August 13, 2008

Tagged with: — John @ 7:45 pm

WordPress rocks. Here are some plugins.

WPBook 0.8.1

Updated: 9/16/08

Updated: Now enables users to invite their friends to your application, provided you enable the appropriate setting inside WordPress admin.

This plugin enables you to pull recent blog posts from your blog in to facebook, and allow facebook users to enter comments. Their comments show up on your blog whether accessed directly or through facebook, and regular blog comments will show up in facebook as well.

You can see this plugin in action (on Facebook) at OpenParenthesis - a facebook version of this blog’s three most recent posts.

Download WPBook 0.8.1 from this site or the WordPress plugin directory.

MBLA+ 0.5.2

Updated: 6/01/08

This plugin is in essence an enhanced (from my point of view) version of MBLA, which is changed in order to:

Use hAvatar (included, also slightly modified) to get avatars from commenter’s hCards, if one exists at the URL they provide
Get URL-based avatars as well as Email based avatars from MyBlogLog
Not use Google Preview image if no avatar is found

Installation is simple - just put both the mbla_plus and hAvatar folders inside your wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate both through the administration plugins screen.

The entire caching system, mechanism for getting avatars into templates, and mechanism for setting priority order, as well as the preferences administration is directly used from MBLA - as changes are made there I will try to keep in synch with that code base.

You should NOT install this along with either MBLA or hAvatar in their original versions: conflicts will undoubtedly occur.

You can see this plugin in action on OpenParenthesis and Goatless.

Download MBLA Plus 0.51

Trackback url for this post: http://www.openparenthesis.org/code/wp/trackback

6 Comments for this post

Alex Says: May 25th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

Hello,
I find this plug-in very interesting, but I cannot get it really working. Once installed following the installation procedure on wordpress plugin directory, I get this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘{’ in /home/mhd-01/www.tecnopolis.eu/htdocs/blog/wp-content/themes/wp-facebook/config.php on line 28

my canvas url:
http://apps.facebook.com/wpfbtecnopolis/

many thanks for any help.
regards, Alex

John Says: May 25th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

Alex - I updated to WPBook 0.7.2 - perhaps you were using PHP4, which doesn’t support try{ } catch{ }.

Download and try out 0.7.2 and let me know if that works for you.

Alister Cameron // Blogologist Says: July 5th, 2008 at 8:48 am

John,

Perhaps I am stupid…

But I get a blank page on my Facebook canvas page.

I see it is because my WP install can’t handle the querystring parameters coming from facebook’s page request.

This, in turn, is because the page on my site is not using your template. It’s using the template I designed.

So what do I do?

Am I supposed to merge them both? (Both index.php files??)

Or is it supposed to be able to get my WP install to bypass my own theme in favour of yours automatically or something??

Thanks for your help.

-Alister

PS. Please email my your reply as I cannot “subscribe” to your comments here.

Ricky Says: August 13th, 2008 at 8:46 am

Hi John,

To make it short. I have exactly the same problem as Alister reg. my wpbook plugin. I’m getting a blank page on my Facebook canvas page Here.

I thought it might have something to do with the ‘call back url’ which I experimented with to no avail. In my last attempt I set the facebook application c.b url to:
…myblog/wp-content/themes/wp-facebook/index.php

As for now I’ve used my main blog to test the plugin (which is an excellent idea). And if I get it working I have another site in the pipeline where the wpbook plugin would be, to say the least, an excellent additional resource.

Please help me,

Ricky

John Says: August 13th, 2008 at 9:01 am

Ricky - I’ve replied offline in email to try to narrow down your problem.

For all users - the callback url you give facebook should just be your regular blog url.

If you are using a “custom home page” which is not the default wordpress blog homepage, you may run into issues I am investigating.

Ricky Says: August 13th, 2008 at 9:11 am

Hey,
Forgot to mention that I have the latest version of both WP(Version 2.6) and wpbook(0.7.3).

Cheers,
Ricky