jim – Page 3 – Behind the Scenes

How Tripawds Got Their Feed Back

Tripawds bloggers may have wondered where their dashboard notice announcing the most recent Tripawds News blog post went a few weeks ago. If not, they’re certain to notice the new announcement listing the five most recent posts from all the Tripawds Featured Blogs.

With the WordPress 3.1.2 update, the “Dashboard Feed” option mysteriously disappeared, leaving site administrators no way to show recent posts in the dashboard of all blogs across the network. It left me wondering what the heck happened! I posted in the WordPress forums about our Missing Recent Posts Feed in User Dashboard, asking if anyone else noticed or had an answer as to why it was gone. Silence.

About a week later, one member finally confirmed the issue and came up with a fix. The solution, however, required hacking the functions.php file which would not work for this community since Tripawds members can choose from more than 130 blog themes. Thanks to our Supporter plugin from WPMU Dev, Tripawds Supporters have access to even more premium themes.

How to Show Recent Posts from RSS Feed in User Dashboard

Piet from WordPress Tips quickly developed this plugin to show the latest posts from the main site of a multisite install in the user dashboard of all sub-sites across the network. By default the widget displays the three most recent posts from the main site. While no configuration is required for those happy with these settings, the plugin can easily be modified.

Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget Configuration Options:

Edit msrss.php to add the feed of your choice. (Default: blog_id=1)
Edit msrss.php to change the number of posts displayed (Default: 3).
Edit msdbfeed.php to change the widget’s title. (Default: Recent Updates)
See installation instructions for complete details.

We took things a step further by adding the extra information and links shown below the recent posts, as shown in our screenshot above. We also created a created a custom feed for multiple blogs to use in the widget.

How to Create a Recent Featured Posts Feed

Tripawds uses the Recent Global Posts Feed plugin from WPMU Dev to generate our feed for recent posts from all member blogs. This convenient plugin includes a Recent Global Posts Feed Widget for showing our global posts feed as a sidebar widget.

Tripawds Recent Featured Posts

When we wanted to only show posts from certain blogs in Piet’s Dashboard Feed Widget, however, I turned to the WPMU Dev Forums for support. As usual, masonjames had a quick answer for creating our Featured Blogs feed. Following his suggestions, here’s how I did it:

Download the Recent Global Posts Feed plugin.
Save a copy and rename the file “recent-featured-posts-feed.php”
Edit line 3 to change the plugin name (Plugin Name: Recent Featured Posts Feed)

Next, I added the specific blogs we wanted to include in the feed by editing line 58 as follows:

$query = $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT * FROM " . $wpdb->base_prefix . "site_posts WHERE blog_id IN (1, 167, 500, 138, 113, 262, 3) AND site_id = %d AND blog_public = '1' AND post_type = %s ORDER BY post_published_gmt DESC LIMIT %d", $current_site->id, $posttype, $number);

This is the key part where you will need to replace the blog IDs for sites you want included in the feed:

WHERE blog_id IN (1, 167, 500, 138, 113, 262, 3) AND

Upload the file to wp-content/ and check your new feed. It’s that simple. All thanks to our WPMU Dev Premium subscription!

Like and Send Tripawds Posts to Facebook Friends

Facebook recently launched a new Send button for sharing blog posts and other web content with your friends or group members. While the well known Like button lets Facebook members share content with all their friends, the Send button allows them to select a specific friend or group of friends to share what they found.

Now Tripawds members and Facebook Fans – and any visitors who have a Facebook account – can now share the news about great gear, nutrition, gifts or other resources for three legged dogs with the click of a button! The new Send button can now be found on all the Tripawds Featured Blogs, and throughout Jerry’s News Blog.

Find something one of your Facebook friends may find helpful?

Click the Send button.
Enter your friend’s name.
Add a comment. (optional)
Facebook does the rest!

In fact, all Tripawds blogs using the default theme will now show the Send button on all single posts, and pages. Any members using a different theme who would like to have the button added, just let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

For those keeping score of popular posts, sending a post also counts as a “Like” so get sending those Tripawds posts to all your Facebook friends. For anyone interested in how we did this, read on…

How to add Facebook Send Button to Blog Posts

If you’re having a hard time figuring out Facebook’s Send Button instructions, don’t bother. They don’t work with WordPress anyway. The WordPress multisite gurus at WPMU Dev will likely release an awesome Facebook plugin soon, but if you can’t wait, here’s how I did it.

NOTE: Full credit is due to Ronnie at WPMU.org who wrote complete details about Using the new Facebook ‘Send’ button with WordPress.

1. Assuming you’re comfortable editing theme files and know how, copy this entire bit of code:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" show_faces="true" width="450" send="true">

</fb:like>

2. Depending on your theme, find the file single.php or loop-single.php and save a copy, just in case.

3. If you have plenty of time on your hands, learn all about the Loop. You don’t need to know what it does, just where it is. But I digress.

4. Paste the code above somewhere in the loop. Search for “entry-content” and insert the code on a new line before the <div> to show the Facebook Like and Send buttons before at the top of all your blog posts.

4b. The proper location may be determined by “the-entry” or “post-content” – again, this will depend upon your selected theme. Play with positioning and check your work.

5. Finally, you can customize how the buttons display with some attributes.

That’s it! You can see the buttons in action at the top of this post. I also added the buttons to page.php so readers can send their friends helpful pages like the Tripawds Gear Shop. And I added it to various page theme files I customized during our Tripawds makeover, so they show on the Tripawds Forums, Chat and Store pages.

I also chose to hide facebook user profile avatars from showing beneath the buttons by adding the attribute: show_faces=”false”

Adding Facebook Send Button using an iFrame

As with any coding project it seems, there is bound to be conflict somewhere. And I found it with this one upon discovering that the new Send button code provided above broke our dropdown navigation menus on the News blog.

Either the <div> or the script was causing the buttons to show through the menu, or the menu to drop down behind the buttons. However you choose to frame that, it wouldn’t work. So I fixed it with an iframe.

The WPMU Nelo Custom CMS WordPress theme from WPMU Dev that we use for the Tripawds News blog came with an integrated Facebook Like button option. I was able to fix the issue with a simple edit to the iframe by adding the attribute: send=true

Below is the iframe code we’re using on the News blog. It would get inserted in the same place as described above. (Use at your own risk.)

<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;send=true&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:30px"></iframe>

Download WordPress Guide To Easy Blogging

We considered posting this in the Tripawds Downloads blog, but it has much more to do with blogs than it is about three legged dogs.

Download Free WordPress Editors Guide

While we provide Tripawds bloggers with helpful WordPress tutorial videos, and do our best to answer any technical questions about blogging in the Tech Support forum, we want to provide more information for those who want it. That’s why we’re making this comprehensive guide detailing How To Publish a WordPress Blog available as a free PDF download.

This comprehensive WordPress How To Guide covers everything you need to know about writing posts and pages, customizing your blog layout, moderating comments and much, much more. And did we mention it is absolutely free? This is just another value added service we are able to offer thanks to our WPMU Dev Membership.

We won! We won!

It is with extreme pleasure that we are proud to announce we won the WPMU Dev Lifetime Membership contest!

Our recent review of WPMU Dev Plugins that help power the Tripawds Blogs community was selected at random along with two others, so we now have continued access to the best WordPress Multisite pugins and themes available. This means we’ll be able continue to offering great functionality like network-wide user and blog Avatars, the searchable Members Directory of all Tripawds Users, and our our new Global Site Search for searching all Tripawds Blogs, and much more – forever, and all for free.

We would have gladly kept paying our WPMU Dev Premium subscription for the quick and helpful WordPress multisite technical support we receive in the WPMU Dev forums alone. And we’ll probably be keeping the developers just as busy answering our questions, but now with our lifetime membership we can ask for just a little less support for our efforts to maintain the this community.

Consider this a big shout out to the entire WPMU Dev team for hosting this contest. Other winners included a site supporting home schooling in South Africa and a WordPress resources blog. Just goes to show you how the best WordPress plugins can be used in such a wide variety of ways.

How to get free WPMU Dev Membership

Any WordPress multisite network administrator looking for a free WPMU Dev membership is not out of luck because this awesome contest is over! Members can get a Free WPMU DEV Premium Membership by helping out in the support forums to accumulate reputation points. Reach 1,000 and they’ll give you a free lifetime membership! Like I said, great plugins, themes and support from a good bunch of folks.

What makes Tripawds run?

When we first started Jerry’s original three legged dog blog to share the news about his osteosarcoma treatment and recovery, we never in our wildest dreams expected tripawds.com to grow into such an incredible community of support for so many people facing a bone cancer diagnosis or amputation for their dogs.

While installing Simple:Press to power the Tripawds Discussion Forums was the first of many content enhancing improvements, it was our migration from WordPress to WPMU and subsequent transition to our current WordPress Multisite network that make the site such the valuable resource it has become.

In fact, Tripawds was recently added to the acclaimed WPMU Dev Showcase among some of the leading WordPress MultiSite communities online!

Best WordPress Multisite Plugins & Themes

So what exactly makes this network work? Simply said, it’s our WPMU Dev Premium subscription that enables us to offer such amazing functionality. Here’s a rundown of some of our favorite WPMU Dev plugins and themes that power the Tripawds community.

Admin Ads: We provide a row of dashboard “Quick Links” to many of our community’s most valuable resources using this simple plugin. It also allows us to notify bloggers of pending upgrades and other special announcements.

Admin Help Content: This provides a simple interface for creating the custom content we provide in users’ dashboard Help drop-down menu, instead of confusing them with the default WordPress support forum links.

Anti-Splog: This ultimate spam blog plugin and service stops nearly all splogs from even being created in our WordPress Multisite network. If a splog does get created, no posts are visible to the community, and an easy interface allows us to moderate or delete them.

Avatars: Ths is how we allows users to upload ‘user avatars’ and ‘blog avatars’ which then appear in blog / forum comments and blog / user listings throughout the Tripawds community.

Blogs Directory: This plugin provides a paginated, fully searchable, automatic and rather good looking directory of all of the blogs on our WordPress Multisite installation.

Members Directory: This creates and automatic directory of all Tripawds users, with avatars, pagination, and a built in search facility with extended customizable user profiles.

Invite: Allows all Tripawds bloggers to invite their friends and colleagues via email to check out their blog and register for a Tripawds account.

Recent Comments: This widget lets us display a list of recent comments from all Tripawds blogs throughout the News blog.

Recent Global Posts Widget: This widget shows recent posts from all Tripawds blogs, with user avatars.

Sitemaps and SEO: Automatically generates and submit Google sitemaps for all blogs on this network

Supporter: Lets us easily offer paid Tripawds Supporter Blog accounts with automatic upgrades including premium themes, premium plugins, extra storage space, the ability to instantly remove banner ads and more.

Terms Of Service: This plugin places the Tripawds Terms of Service on the signup with an approval checkbox users must select in order to continue their registration.

The WordPress Popup Plugin: Allows us to display a simple ad directing new visitors to the valuable information in our first Tripawds e-book, Three Legs and a Spare – a Canine Amputation Handbook.

Update Notifications: This keeps us automatically updated of any WPMU Dev plugin and theme updates for best security and functionality!

WPMU Nelo: The custom homepage CMS WordPress theme we customized to improve navigation and address site performance issues.

What’s next?

I often turn to the WPMU Dev support forums for quick answers whenever I need help tweaking things behind the scenes here. I have requested development of a couple things that might help us continue enhancing the Tripawds experience. For instance, I’d like to have a Map plugin that would automatically generate a map page with member locations based on profile data.

With all this that we already offer in mind, what other new features might Tripawds members like to see?