WPBook 1.5.2 released

I’ve just tagged and released version 1.5.2 of WPBook, which should be available for download by the time you read this.

In this version:

• Plugin now checks for PHP 5 at activation, will not allow activation under PHP4
• Checks for zero pages of which user is admin (avoid edge case exception)
• Added link to installation instructions to permissions page
• Added offline-access permission request (some users had not yet granted this permission)

Added “show errors” mode, which when enabled traps exceptions thrown by the Facebook client and shows them to the user

Not really a required upgrade, but it should help folks having trouble, and won’t cause trouble for others.

I will also now close comments on the existing 1.5 release blog post, as it is now out of date.

In general, I’d prefer not to use comments for troubleshooting anyway – please use the support forums for those kinds of items instead.

Thanks

WPBook 1.4 Released

(Update 1/14 – now 1.4.2. Fixes detailed in readme – Admin side javascript issue, issue with submitting comments for folks who install wordpress files in a subdirectory different than their root URL)

(Updated 1/5 – it’s actually 1.4.1 now, as there was a typo in the theme/index.php file – get_exteral_url should be get_external_url).

Last night I packaged and released version 1.4 of WPBook, the plugin I maintain which creates a view of your WordPress blog as a Facebook application.

(For example, see Open Parenthesis as a blog, and then Open Parenthesis as a Facebook app).

Highlights of this release

• Fixed bug which made invite friends link only work on the home page
• Fixed bug in setting for custom/header footer which included a permalink
  (WordPress support topic 306263)
• Added Gravatar support
• Added (experimentally) a list of “pages” as well – this means you should able to use WPBook even if you have a static homepage set in WordPress – just use the url of your home page as the “Canvas Callback URL”
• Removed hard coded references to wp-content and plugins directories
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/05/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-hardcoding-wp-content)
• Removed hard coded reference to config.php, routing Facebook comment submission through WordPress’ built in query parser instead
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/06/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-2-direct-calls-to-plugin-files)

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WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston

Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.
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Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King’s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).
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New WordPress plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet

When Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin was in its 1.x days, I published some directions on how to change the API endpoints to point to Identi.ca.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.