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SimpleLife Plugin Ready!

So I hacked together a lifestream using SimplePie, and it turned out quite a few people were interested. Whilst it was great for people who could code or who were interested in coding, it wasn’t great for the PHP challenged amongst us - what the greater community really needs, even those who are big on code but short on time, is simplicity.

So I set about tranforming my PHP script into a fully fledged plugin for wordpress, below is a preview of the options page:

options.GIF

As you can see - everything is contained on one options screen. Click on the color labels for each feed and up pops a 217 web safe colour palette. Choose a colour and you get an example in the box. The piece de resistence though, save the options and the plugin automatically updates the username/feed field to give you an up to date example of what each lifestream option will look like for that feed. Color clashes? Change them!

Also - in most cases its enough to enter your service username. However, some sites aren’t compatible with this such as flickr - I *could* add some scripting to change a flickr username to an ID, but in my experience this is not only buggy, but requries the bundling of the Flickr API, which adds a bit of overhead. Instead you just add your ID (there is a link to IDGETTR which will tell you your ID).

Is there anything I’ve not thought of I wonder? I’ll provide a limit for number of items shown, and of course there will be a widget as standard. Please let me know if there is anything you’d be interested in seeing in the first release proper, or in future releases. Spread the word too if you can, I don’t want this to be the best lifestream plugin I want it to be the wordpress lifestream plugin.

PS. Anyone any good at styling plugin options screens, I’m struggling to make my options pretty in layout :)

Filed by Kieran at December 21st, 2007 under Code, SimpleLife, Wordpress

1. At 9:50 am on December 21, 2007, Mike Hedge wrote:

super duper exciting!!!!!!! ready and waiting to launch it on my site!!!

2. At 3:48 pm on December 21, 2007, Apollo wrote:

Will there be an option for changing the icons for each feed? How about how they are wrapped (list items, divs, spans, etc.)? I did a lot of customization of the old version to get it working how I wanted and it’d be a shame to not have those available if I upgrade.

3. At 6:16 pm on December 21, 2007, Kieran wrote:

Apollo -

No, as of the first version, icons will not be replacable - its something thats fallen down the list in order to meet my self imposed deadline. I will, however, be adding that functionality in the next revision which should be a few days behind.

Also, i hadn’t thought of the encapsulation. I’m loathe to change it too much - if you provide me a link, I will of course look at it. Probably i will settle for a choice of display options like Block List (like the default currently) and Divs. However, this will probably be near the bottom in all honesty as display wise you can already change the entire color scheme, and in fact, it would only take a few tweaks to make a list display how your lifestream is displaying now. Probably better to offer more options for styling the list, such as width and borders? What do you think?

4. At 8:18 pm on December 21, 2007, Joel de Bruijn wrote:

Hello Kieran, thanks for your plug,
but I’ve a question: the stream uses the cache capabilities of WordPress. Does this mean that it pulls in the feeds, so they become actual blogpostings?
I want to archive every item in the stream, for later reviewing and lookup. When every item is a post in the wordpress database, then I can convert my stream in the future to whatever wordpress is developing.
You can see it at work: wwww.joeldebruijn.nl
4 w: when, where, what, who….
I use FeedWordpress to pull the feeds en CategoryIcon,
to simulate a stream.
Thanks for sharing your plug!

5. At 8:42 pm on December 21, 2007, Kieran wrote:

4. Joel,

Nope, the plugin simply holds each stream in cache for a predetermined (by you) amount of time. It doesn’t save anything to the database, it just holds it so that for x minutes any visitor will see the same info. This prevents popular websites making hundreds of requests to the same stream.

I really like how you’ve set up your lifestream though, I did contemplate doing that myself, using wordpress as a lifestream system. However, for me, after I’ve done something I very rarely go back. So I’m too bothered about archives etc, just a very recent history….

6. At 12:50 am on January 2, 2008, Kevin Donahue wrote:

Awesome! Just grabbed the download, so I will let you know how it goes from the voice of the common man! ;)

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