Matt Jacob

If you go to the plugin settings page, and then go to help, I think you’ll find what you’re looking for. The available tokens are: {date}, {time}, and {excerpt}. Check out the help contents for a description of what each one does.

That’s interesting. Are you referring to new posts coming in since you made the change, or old posts that existed prior to making the code change above? The URL shouldn’t contain pingfm unless it’s a permalink to a status update posted from Ping.fm. This sounds like it might be related to your permalink settings or your template.

Unfortunately, the Ping.fm service itself has been on a downward trajectory since it was acquired by Seesmic in Jan 2010. The latest version of the plugin was released in Aug 2010, and it’ll probably be my last unless Seesmic decides to actively support Ping.fm. For obvious reasons, I just can’t justify spending time on the plugin when the service it depends on has an uncertain future.

Matt

I’d need more information in order to give you a better answer, but some thoughts off the top of my head are:

• Is the web server Apache or something else?
• Are there any security plugins on the site that’s not working?
• Anything interesting in the logs?
• Can you hit the generated URL through a browser?
• Is there any plugin installed that could be messing with custom post types?

No problem. ??

This plugin is for posting things from Ping.fm to your blog. You can ping from the dashboard, email, phone, or an app that supports Ping.fm. Also, by default, only status updates from Ping.fm will show up in the widget.

Sure! Check out these other threads about the same issue:

Thread 1
Thread 2

And specifically this post.

Matt

@robbie_k Short answer: no.

Long answer: prior to WP3, the notion of “post types” didn’t exist, and so there was a plugin preference to force everything from Ping.fm to be a normal post. (Status updates and micro-blogs were stored in their own DB table that the plugin created.) This was less than optimal for a whole bunch of reasons.

WP3 introduced custom post types, and I updated my plugin accordingly. Now, status updates and micro-blogs are real, full posts as far as WP is concerned (no more separate DB table!), but their post type is different from posts that you would create yourself. However, WP3 gives us the tools necessary (custom queries) to act on those custom post types.

Therefore, marshaling all Ping.fm posts into standard WP posts would be a step backward and semantically incorrect. That’s why I encouraged you to get the other solution working before showing you the easy way out. It’s easy, but it’s not the best technical solution in my mind.

??

Matt

This is obviously not ideal, but it might be the easiest thing for you at this point. In classes/PingFmCustomUrlUtils.php, look near line 13 and you should see this:

const CUSTOM_POST_TYPE = 'pingfm';

Change it to this instead:

const CUSTOM_POST_TYPE = 'post';

Don’t change anything else in that file. Save it and try a test ping. Everything should work like you want it to. Note: you’ll still have to update all your existing posts that have a post_type of pingfm. I think I posted the sample SQL update to do that in the other thread.

Good luck!! Let me know how it works for you.

Matt

I replied in the other thread you posted this in…

It all depends on how your theme files are organized, right? Not all themes share the exact same file layout, but most of them have index.php, comments.php, single.php, etc. See the wiki entry on Theme Development for more information. I want to help, but I can’t just do it for you.

Matt

There are a couple different ways to do this, but the preferred method is by updating your theme to show the custom post type used by my plugin. The link I sent you earlier via Twitter describes how to do that. You’ll have to swap out the main loop in your template with a customized loop that looks like this (code copied from the linked article):

$args = array( 'post_type' => 'product', 'posts_per_page' => 10 );
$loop = new WP_Query( $args );
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();
	the_title();
	echo '<div class="entry-content">';
	the_content();
	echo '</div>';
endwhile;

Instead of 'post_type' => 'product', you can try 'post_type' => array('post', 'pingfm'). (Note: I haven’t tried this myself, so you might have to experiment until you get it how you want it.)

The second way to do what you want would be to modify the actual plugin code so that everything gets inserted with a post type of ‘post’. This is less than ideal, though.?You’ll have to do a DB update on your posts table to accommodate all the existing pings, and you’ll have to make the change every time you upgrade to a new version of the plugin.

I would try the theme route first. ??

Matt

One thought about the post not showing up in your blog: if it was a status update or microblog post, make sure you’ve activated/added the plugin’s sidebar widget. Those types of posts only show up in the sidebar widget, while full blog posts from Ping.fm show up in your normal blog. You can, of course, choose which post types show up in your main loop by modifying your theme, but that’s another topic for another thread.

To answer your question, the plugin is primarily designed to accept posts from Ping.fm and post them to your blog—just like the rest of the networks that Ping.fm supports. There are other plugins that will theoretically post to Ping.fm every time you update your blog, but like you said, I’m not sure that they’re 100% working right now.

The use case you described (having status updates distributed everywhere) is the scenario that I designed the plugin around, because that’s what I wanted to be able to do the most. This was a few years ago, before Twitter had really gotten popular, and I wanted my regular blog readers to be able to see some of the same updates I was posting to Twitter.

Matt

My plugin works just fine, and I think it’ll do exactly what you want. The problem is that Ping.fm doesn’t support posting to self-hosted (www.ads-software.com) blogs natively, so it keeps trying to connect to WordPress.com using the credentials for your self-hosted blog. That’s obviously not gonna work.

Install my plugin and set it up as a Custom URL network in Ping.fm. (Instructions are provided when you try to access the plugin settings page for the first time.)

Good luck! Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.

Matt

Hey, glad you’re finding it useful!

Matt