Tim Nicholson

No, Gigya doesn’t even claim to do that. There is a plugin called Socialite that will, but its coded in such a way that it conflicts with most other plugins that provide Facebook Connect support.

If you are a programmer, you can probably figure out how to modify the Gigya plugin to do that, but I’m thinking its not all that easy to do.

I sure would like to see a single plugin that handles both user login, avatars, commenting, etc. but also handles publisher features like sending new posts to various social media sites… and in a perfect world, collects comments on those posts and pulls them back onto WordPress. So this is my dream and right now nothing is close and I plan on hacking code until I get there, but its just not that easy to do.

frasten, that’s great! I always think its best to get any enhancements rolled into the original plugin, as long as they are of general value to other users. That way we don’t have to worry about upgrading when a new version comes out.

BTW, kudos to you for your well-written code that this was so easy to do and also for including the cache feature.

Yes, there seems to be a dearth of documentation on the new custom post types. I’d like to know how to add a new post type and then not only how to select just that post type but also how to choose to exclude those posts from other functions, such as RSS feeds, site searches, home page, archives, etc.

I’m thinking I might want to write a very simple plugin for discussion forums that use the standard WP tables. The benefits would be that the forums could automatically show in site navigation, standard widgets for posts/pages, site searches; automatic comment and pingback capability; etc.

I did find just one reference to this in wp-includes/posts.php there is a call to a function register_post_type(). However, doing a quick file search, I can’t find where that function itself is defined. Of course many standard WP functions have always allowed a post_type parameter, so I assume they have been rewritten to validate posts types against those that are officially registered with register_post_type() so not much change is needed in selecting the custom post types.

I have also read that the “user interface” for custom post types is not coming until WP v3.0. I’m not really sure what that means, although I guess it probably means there will be more specialized functions for selecting, displaying, updating custom post types just to make things easier.

popokolok, sorry for the delay in responding. Is there a way for me to subscribe to get email updates when someone posts a reply to a topic I’ve started or replied to?

Anyway, yes… the magpie RSS version that I am using is 2009.0725. Its working fine with FWP 2009.1112 for me. What kind of errors or strange behavior are you getting?

vaibhavkanwal, I do like your author bio on the articles. I have an about us in the footer throughout the site and have gone back and forth on showing my ugly mug versus a site logo.

The funny thing is that your header that says ProgrammingKid in blue and green is almost identical to the colors I used in my initial logo. I only show a small logo in the footer, though. I should try to work the logo into the header.

Also, I found a really nice website with a ton of great-looking website header images. https://www.freewebpageheaders.com/. None of them have a “social” theme for my website, but there are some great graphics there.

Thanks for the feedback, vaibhavkanwal. I did start with a pretty popular theme and while I made a TON of changes to it, the overall look is pretty much the same as the original. I spent most of my time getting it variable width, tweaking the home page with custom top and bottom widgets, 404 page, search pages, tweaking plugins, enhancing the Facebook connect functionality, etc.

I did change out the header graphic, but its very similar to the original (blue, abstract). I would like to get a header that plays up the social aspects of the site, I’m just more of a programmer at heart than an artist. Which leads me to ask in general if folks have found some good sites that have headers that you can use for free where I might find something suitable to start from.

As for typography, I did increase the base font size earlier today per bestofblogger’s suggestion. So you probably were looking at the new version.

As for being run-of-the-mill in general, was it mostly the header that you thought should be souped up or did the layout and combination of plugins, etc. not seem right to you? I wasn’t really trying to showcase a new killer theme as I’ve used a stock one, but was wanting to know if the overall site layout, content, plugins, etc. all seemed to work well together and accomplish what I was trying to accomplish with the site (focus on my Facebook apps, but mention my other websites, provide curated social networking news that users of my Facebook apps might be interested in).

One thing I’ve been toying with is the home page design. I’ve played with featured article sliders, grouping articles by category, including thumbnails, etc. I have been able to make all that work, but in the end feel like having an excerpt and the related comments shown inline was most suitable for a new site still trying to get the word out about what the site is for and what I do. If you have some home page layout or even full website you think I should look at trying to mirror on my site, let me know.

Thanks again!

I like the site. Nice, clean layout. I’m wondering why you have only 5 articles per page, though. Since you are displaying only excerpts, I think 10 would be fine. Also, you have some really great photos on your posts. I’d like to see you display a thumbnail when viewing the home and category pages. Lure us in with the nice pics! ??

Also, since you cover such a broad range of topics, you might want to consider a home page template that shows the most recent post within each category. Like “Recent from Chinese Food”, “Recent from Chinese Knots”, etc.

You might want to consider a featured article section at the top of the home page. This would look great with the photos you have and could feature some of your more popular or recent posts.

Thanks, bestofblogger. The original theme is by N Design Studio. https://www.ndesign-studio.com/. The original was fixed width and I changed it to be variable width. I also changed it to display excerpts rather than full posts and inserted the comments inline. I added a number of small touches to it and a bunch of plugins.

I’m glad it worked well in Mozilla. My laptop is 1024×768 and the small font looks OK, but I was worried it would be too small in higher-resolution monitors. I might actually change the scale to em’s instead of pixels as that should render even more consistently across various monitor resolutions. What’s a pain is that all the other fonts are defined as relative to the base font, so if I increase the base font size then I’ll have to adjust all the other font sizes as they will be too large. Thanks for confirming that this was an issue and worth the time to change it all.

Nice site. Just one suggestion: change the link hover color to something other than black in the tag cloud. Since the background is black, its really hard to see what’s highlighted.

Site looks nice. I like the green. My site theme is green as well ?? One suggestion I have would be to modify your top-nav to include a list of your categories. I think it would be more obvious that you are news style site. Right now I thought you might be a hosting company because all I saw was Home and About in the top nav.

You can do this by adding the following to your header, right after the call to wp_list_categories(). You may need to mess with the CSS to get it to look the same as the page links, though.
<?php wp_list_pages(‘sort_column=menu_order&title_li=’); ?>
You can add a depth parameter of &depth=1 if you only want to list the parent categories.

Looks nice. In just glancing at the site, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. I’m not in love with the black titles on gray background in the footer.

2. When you are viewing a category, you should display one pic from the article like on the home page. Its not very compelling to just page through text only on a site dedicated to pictures.

3. You might want to put the rating in the “Top Posts” widget, which is actually the score for the girl. i.e. Model #1 (9.5/10) or something like that. You might want to feature this widget at the top of the home page even rather than way down in the footer. Maybe have top girls and newest girls widgets at the top of the page.

Yes, I have it working just fine… but it absolutely requires replacing the rss.php and rss-functions.php files in WP 2.9 with the ones included with the fwp plugin. Otherwise, you’ll get all kinds of whacky stuff happening.

baal666, did you not actually try what I posted? It doesn’t display a thumbnail in your post, it adds a <link rel=”image_src” href=”image-thumbnail”> line of code, which as you pointed out from the Facebook docs, tells Facebook what image(s) to show when you share/link to a post. This works on my site at https://xtremelysocial.com. Note that it only works when you use the wordpress image uploader. If you hard code a link to an image in the post it doesn’t work.

This is definitely an issue that I’d like to see addressed. I’ve been using a facebook connect plugin for a while now and if I switch to Gigya, everyone will get new accounts created. One way to address this would be via the email address and an email hash from the social networking site. For users that registered directly with a WordPress site, email is required and could be used.

In my case, the fbconnect plugin doesn’t store the email so its not a solution that work in this case. I’d like to see Gigya return the social network user ID and have the WordPress plugin check for a user with that same ID. I get that this would basically be programming it to handle other plugins, but right now its a barrier to people using the gigya plugin. There are only two fbconnect WordPress plugins, and I could tell you how each of them stores the fb user id. I might be able to figure out how to do all this on my own, but it would be much better if it was coded into the core plugin.

One thing I don’t see mentioned here is that if the user is already logged in to WordPress and then connects with Gigya, it links the two accounts. So just be sure to tell you visiters to login directly first before connecting to gigya if they want their same user profile saved (for comments, etc.). Some of the more advanced sites out there actually will have you connect and then prompt you to log in with your old ID to link them. That would be *awesome* if you guys could build that in.

For the issue with the user name containing a space, that should be a somple fix. I haven’t implemented it yet, but looking in gs-for-wordpress.php in the function registerNewGigyaUser(), you could change the line that says:
$user = $nick;
to be:
$user = str_replace(' ','',$nick);
or:
$user = str_replace(' ','_',$nick); if you want to have spaces replaced with an underscore instead.

First name and last name look like they are filled with the individual fields from gigya and I believe WordPress will default the display name to firstname lastname with a space.

However, in looking at the code, I don’t think that the gigya plugin actually checks for a match on the user name (user_login field). It only checks if they are logged in directly to WordPress already or not. So removing the space is not going to help with duplicate users being created.

I have a lot of other suggestions as well and have emailed some to the gigya support desk, but will create a new post on these WordPress plugin forums to get others input.

I enjoyed reading everyone’s ideas. There are a lot of good suggestions here. Here are my thoughts:

The default WP theme first and foremost should serve as a great starting point for new themes as Kubrik is today. The css tags and layout/structure should remain similar in the new version. I don’t think the default theme should be a complex theme framework. I do think that it should demonstrate what is possible to do with WP, such as displaying horizontal lists of both categories and pages, thumbnail images, and several sidebars.

The default theme should define the sidebars that most themes will support. Just because there are lots of sidebars does NOT mean they all need to be used. Rather they serve as a way for WP to be used more like a CMS for those that want to. If nothing is added to a sidebar, it wouldn’t display. Eg if Left Nav and Right Nav 1 was left blank, you’d have a traditional single right-nav layout.

* Header (add social networking icons, ad block, etc.)
* Page Top
* Main Content Top
* Left Nav 1 (doesn’t show if empty)
* Left Nav 2
* Right Nav 1
* Right Nav 2
* Main Content Bottom
* Page Bottom
* Footer (add nav, popular posts, recent comments, etc.)

I’d like the theme to be fast and if adding options for fonts, colors, etc. will slow it down too much, then I’d suggest just putting DEFINE’s all in a single location in the theme so that people can easily change them there. Note that options for number of columns that people have suggested wouldn’t be needed if you use the multiple “sidebars” approach above.

I’d like to see the default theme include a layout for every layout that exists (home, author, etc.). People have suggested including multiple themes, but I think we just need multiple home and page templates. For example:

* Home – Magazine Style (thumbnails, large format for sticky or featured posts, smaller format or just small thumbnail and title/date/comment count for articles by category)
* Home – Blog Style with Excerpts
* Home – Blog Style with Full Posts
* Page – Standard Width
* Page – Full Width
* Page – Contact Form

Let’s also reflect that the web is *social* in 2010 and by default display comments inline and display a small comment box that grows as you type when you hit reply instead of loading the single post page. This doesn’t necessarily need ajax, but at least simple javascript to hide/display the comment box.

I also think that the default theme should be impressive looking and easy to read. Why NOT have it good enough that people actually use it? I’d model the look and feel after the excellent themes at ElegantThemes or StudioPress. You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) include all the plugins that they do, but something like the look and feel of those themes would be awesome for showing how good WP can look and how its way more than just a simple blogging system.

Oh, and some basic SEO features should be built in as well. I’m not saying to have a bunch of options, but simply implement best-practice for things like building the meta description… use category and tag descriptions and/or post excerpts, etc. where appropriate.