GS Blog v1.4

[QuestarDean]

Hi. I have been implementing this plugin into one of my sites, and I have ran in to a similar problem to what users 'focoves' and 'Shawn_a' have been having. Basically, I wanted to have the news items display on the latest news page and in the sidebar of the homepage. I have managed to do this, however, I was wondering if it's possible to also include the thumbnail?

I have used the code mentioned in comments 134 and 138 (this worked superb by the way) and just wondered if there was any way of adapting this code to handle this? Any help would be appreciated...

[mikeh]

Version 1.2 Added To Extend

• Custom Fields Implemented
  
• Added options for show_recent_posts() function to optionally display
  excerpt, read more link, show thumbnails, and define the excerpt length
  
• Added ability to template the blog pages (from the settings page)
  
• Updated Spanish language file
  
• Various other minor changes
  

I tested the new version multiple times using a clean install and did not catch any bugs. But as there is quite a drastic change in the plugins functionality in version 1.2, please bare with me if you run into a bug. I will try my best to work out any bugs that might occur and improve usability of the custom fields as quickly as I can.

Hi. I have been implementing this plugin into one of my sites, and I have ran in to a similar problem to what users 'focoves' and 'Shawn_a' have been having. Basically, I wanted to have the news items display on the latest news page and in the sidebar of the homepage. I have managed to do this, however, I was wondering if it's possible to also include the thumbnail?

I have used the code mentioned in comments 134 and 138 (this worked superb by the way) and just wondered if there was any way of adapting this code to handle this? Any help would be appreciated...

I have added the requested functionality to the new version.
You will see below you have the option to provide "true" to display the thumbnail and you can provide a string, such as "Read More" to display the read more link:

Code:

show_blog_recent_posts($excerpt=false, $excerpt_length=null, $thumbnail=null, $read_more=null)

Usage Example:

Code:

<?php show_blog_recent_posts(true, 120, true, 'Click To Read More'); ?>

[QuestarDean]

Hi mikeh.

Thanks for the quick response. I will look at implementing this now. I'm sure these additional options will provide endless possibilities...

[Oleg06]

Code:

<select id="post-category" name="post-category" class="text shorts"></select>

I have created four categories, but none will be seen

[mikeh]

Version 1.2.2 Added To Extend

• Fixed issue preventing category dropdown from being populated on the "edit page" screen
  

Code:

<select id="post-category" name="post-category" class="text shorts"></select>

I have created four categories, but none will be seen

Problem fixed. Please update to version 1.2.1

[Oleg06]

category in Russian look like

date

[mikeh]

category in Russian look like

date

You are going to have to do the same fix you did before.

[libygo]

Dont work in russian!

[colaK]

Sorry if I am missing something obvious here, but in my install every blog post has the exact same meta title (which is that of the main site).

Is there something I need to add to my template to make the meta titles match the blog post titles?

[colaK]

... more worrying is that the canonical tag is present on every page, and lists the main blog url

This is not coded in the templates, so I guess it is being called by the GS header function


Each page needs to have its own meta title, and the canonical tag needs to somehow be removed or corrected.
If we can't do this, then the blog posts will run into real problems trying to rank on search engines.

[added]
For anyone unsure of the purpose of the canonical tag, it's purpose is to tell the search engines that the page should be seen as that URL, and not the one it is actually viewing, in other words, it is similar to saying 'please ignore this page and instead index the home page' ... which is not what we want to happen.

[mikeh]

... more worrying is that the canonical tag is present on every page, and lists the main blog url

This is not coded in the templates, so I guess it is being called by the GS header function


Each page needs to have its own meta title, and the canonical tag needs to somehow be removed or corrected.
If we can't do this, then the blog posts will run into real problems trying to rank on search engines.

[added]
For anyone unsure of the purpose of the canonical tag, it's purpose is to tell the search engines that the page should be seen as that URL, and not the one it is actually viewing, in other words, it is similar to saying 'please ignore this page and instead index the home page' ... which is not what we want to happen.

To get rid of the canonical tag you'll need to remove the get_header() function from your template file. To keep it on the other pages of your website, make a template file specifically for the blog system and remove it from that template file only.

I will add a method of setting and retrieving meta tags in the next version.

[colaK]

Thanks Mikeh - but until I can set unique titles for each blog post, I will need to uninstall.

I need the pages to be indexed and rank in their own right.

Will keep checking back for the next update though.

[newdeepdan]

This plugin has been very useful and its great in terms of what my clients need, however I'm having some issues with it. I am using the lastest version of 1.2.1 and any links in the post do not actually work.

The HTML shows: <a href="/">LINK</a>

[mikeh]

This plugin has been very useful and its great in terms of what my clients need, however I'm having some issues with it. I am using the lastest version of 1.2.1 and any links in the post do not actually work.

The HTML shows: <a href="/">LINK</a>

What links are you referring too? Links to the blog posts or links within the blog posts?

[newdeepdan]

This plugin has been very useful and its great in terms of what my clients need, however I'm having some issues with it. I am using the lastest version of 1.2.1 and any links in the post do not actually work.

The HTML shows: <a href="/">LINK</a>

What links are you referring too? Links to the blog posts or links within the blog posts?

Links within the blog posts.

[eddy]

Is there a way to have blog posts display HTML (or XML, etc.) in 'pre' or 'code' blocks and have the greater-than and less-than characters get converted to their "entity" forms (&gt; and &lt?

For example, if I'm writing a blog post, and paste something like:

<Directory />
Options None
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Directory>

and then highlight it and choose the "Formatted" paragraph format, the preview looks good. If I switch to the "Source" view in the editor, I see that the greater/less than symbols are in their entity forms.

However, after I save and view the blog post, the greater/less than symbols appear as-is, so the <Directory> and </Directory> lines gets sucked up by the browser and are not displayed.

Any suggestions?

[alexisninja]

Hi I'm having an issue with the plugin I recently downloaded.

When I try to create a post I get the error message "Could not open the rss.rss file".

I'm using the recent version of the plugin and the recent version of GS.

Ive searched my ftp for this file but dose not exists.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

[protrade]

Hi there,

Love your idea with BLOG .. have some issue about comments.

I've seen you want to give us a data base comments possibility

Could you specify when is it going to happen ?

all best, protrade

[Oleg06]

category and date with the Russian language does not work

[lr]

Is there a quick way of making the dated archives a drop down menu?
Any guidance much appreciated..

[fiktiv]

First of all, I really like this plugin. It's very easy to use and implement into different websites.

However, I'm having a really hard time getting the publish date to show. The blog_post_date class actually shows up when I view the source in Chrome, but not the actual content even though I've filled it out the Publish date in the Post options. I also tried to make a costum post template and it had the same results as stated above.

Any ideas to why it's behaving this way?

If it matters, I use WAMP (localhost) to test everything out. I checked the website's health out but everything seems to be in order.

[fr3nzy]

@fiktiv

The reason you're not getting the date to show up is because php under windows doesn't support the date format that GS Blog plugin is using by default. The plugin uses the strftime function to convert the date to a string and the function's 'format' parameter is set to: '%b %e, %Y'. The '%e' modifier which stands for the day of the month, with a space preceding single digits, is not supported on windows platform.

SOLUTION:

The solution is to change the 'format' parameter to something different. Open the 'plugins/blog.php' file and change line 1088 (GS Blog v.1.2.1) from this:

Code:

$date = $Blog->get_locale_date(strtotime($post->date), '%b %e, %Y');

to something like this (notice the lack of the '%e' modifier):

Code:

$date = $Blog->get_locale_date(strtotime($post->date), '%b %#d, %Y');

This will change the way the date is formatted by default. If you want to use custom formatting for posts, you will need to do much the same thing, but instead of changing the 'blog.php' file, you will write your own code, i.e.

Code:

<div class="date"><?php
    echo $Blog->get_locale_date(strtotime($post->date), '<span class="month">%b</span> <span class="day">%#d</span> <span class="year">%Y</span>');
?></div>

You can also try using a linux/unix based hosting service instead, which will alleviate the problem entirely.

[fiktiv]

Thanks fr3nzy!
I'll try it out.

[shawn_a]

On the front end you call
getSettingsData for every setting

This calls getxml which fetches the file via get_file_contents

This happens 26 times, so you are reading a file 26 times per page request.

You should probably be loading the xml once into a global or something instead.

I also see multiple file loads of individual blog pages as well.

[kubikk]

How can I display the date of the function:

<?php show_blog_recent_posts(); ?>

help pliz