I’ve started the overhaul. Portfolio / web-photoblog… drop the blog– maybe ‘webjournal’ sounds better. maybe keep the messy combo.
Right, so I don’t know where I’m going but I’ve just deleted the Meta Comment template and starting from scratch. Don’t expect things to work in the coming weeks. Here comes Meta Comment v.4. What do you mean you don’t care.
See you on the other side. Thanks for tuning in, really. Your thoughts are welcome!
Around 3AM this morning (serriously, I really want this plugin to work) I stumbled on a block of code (see here) that was causing problems on my Wordpress setup at least. It works for me, but others are having difficulties. So, I’ve zipped my whole “Starred Review” folder, made a change or two (Thumbs.db!) and uploaded it as Starred Review 2.0 Beta (Patched).
Install
starred-review.php and the folder starred-review from your plugins directory.That should be it really, if this is your first installation / virgin-install of the patch check Marc’s way-better install page for details / style info.
The default stars are Black gifs, you can easily change these by downloading the original Starred Review file (check out the images folder, replace the files in my patched images black-gif folder). Or download the psd for Photoshop.
Leave a comment if it works, especially if it doesn’t. heh.
This post is going to be less “5 Star”, more whine; I just discovered that half the work I was about to begin today on my (first) Wordpress Plugin Consumer.us has already been put into action as Starred Review by the very worthwhile and talented Marc Hodges. Problem is, it doesn’t really work for me (take your eyes for a wander top-right stylee). Yes, my images are missing, the stars that is. And it appears Marc is in India or something, all very nice… not for wanna-be-motivated programmers like myself. I say wanna-be and that’s been proved again today. I can’t figure out how to replace this very clever bit of php code, with a static address… ussualy the options pannel is used to configure the location / variation of the star image. That doesn’t work for me.
I can’t do anything with my Movie Rating Plugin (which will come out of all of this), until I get that above code fixed. If you want to check out Marc’s plugin, he’s over here!
Update:
I worked out a quick fix / hack. Go into classes.php and you’ll have to do some manual work,
old code:
$img = '';
$img_path = get_option('siteurl').'/wp-content/plugins/starred-review/images/'.$dir;
$decimal = abs($rating - ((int) $rating));
for($i=1;$i< =((int) $rating);$i++)
$img .= "";
if ($decimal > 0)
$img .= "";
for($i=ceil($rating)+1;$i< =$options['rating_scale'];$i++)
$img .= "";
return $img;
replacement code
$img = '';
$img_path = get_option('siteurl').'/wp-content/plugins/starred-review/images/stars-red-gif'.$dir;
$decimal = abs($rating - ((int) $rating));
for($i=1;$i< =((int) $rating);$i++)
$img .= "![\"1.0](\"$img_path/1.0.gif\")
";
if ($decimal > 0)
$img .= "![\"$decimal](\"$img_path/$decimal.gif\")
";
for($i=ceil($rating)+1;$i< =$options['rating_scale'];$i++)
$img .= "![\"no](\"$img_path/0.0.gif\")
";
return $img;
Update 2:
I made a patched version of Marc’s code. Hope he doesn’t mind :D Its Here.
I’ve got the idea for my first WordPress plugin; so far I have the idea, the name and a semi-working demo (Alpha version 0.1 – See “Consuming” here). I don’t know if anyone reading this is a mentalist coder, if anyone’s out there I need some help!
The plan is; you see a film (maybe you’re watching something right now) and you want to tell people, or you want to take note, you want to rate it or provoke discussion. Maybe you just want to remember you saw it, when you wake up the name will be lost. Sure, you could write up a lengthy post on your weblog, or… you could ‘consumer.us’ it. Shit, that name needs work.
So you’re watching a film, its 3AM… it a really great film – you’ll never get round to remebering the name, or buying it – but you want to tell someone – and damn it iChat is empty – well you load up your favorite Mozilla based browser (or hit the dashboard on OS X) and a del.icio.us style entry form appears. It’s pre-configured with your blog details and Amazon Affiliate ID. All you have to do is write in the Movie Name, your rating and maybe a one sentance review (which will appear optionaly to the reader in AJAX form, oh I love Web 2.0)… click “Submit” and voila; its on your WordPress Sidebar. (Demo: on my Homepage: Consuming) I’ve done the demo with K2’s Asides, although I started with a del.icio.us plugin and at one point even thought I’d stumbled on the fully formed idea; Addictions, sadly this is a pretty limited version 1.x of what it could be.
So, where to go from here; Asides is okay. There must be a way to write a plugin that will write and read to its own columns on the blog’s db. Using del.icio.us is possible – but there’s not a tonne I can do with the default entry points “URL” “Details” “Tags”. Oh, I also want to allow comments, from readers on the reviews or ratings (possible with asides). Maybe I should just build a frontend for asides. Then again, If I use Asides I want to hide that catagory (Asides works off a certain category). You can see why if you click “Consuming” from the Category links (nice Category Visability Plugin. Anyway here’s what I want to do:
“Consumer.us” / some other name – is a plugin for wordpress that allows blog authors to display ratings of recently viewed films (maybe books, music and whatever-else denoted by little icons) in their WordPress Sidebar. Film’s are added through Dashboard Widget or del.icio.us style popup window, ratings and short reviews can be accessed by the visitor using AJAX and this is all integrated with Amazon Affiliates and Wishlists through the options panel in WordPress. Visitors can subscribe to the Consumer.us RSS feeds, people can view tag clouds and anyone can scan through a huge library to see whats hot through the del.icio.us styled homepage.
