WordPress Plugin – FV Community News

Posted by Frank | Filed under Wordpress Plugins

Many blogs out there can only produce a couple articles a week while their visitors ask for loads more. It’s sometimes a good idea to add related articles from other blogs to your sidebar. Adding them manually takes lots of time we don’t have. With this new Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.

Features

Currently, the Community News plugin has the following features:

  • Custom post type, with featured images (thumbnails) and tags support.
  • Widget support, with three different widgets to display posts, the post form or a tag cloud.
  • Shortcodes to add a list of recent posts, the post form or a tag cloud to a page.
  • Moderation page, with the ability to modify posts.
  • Akismet spam protection.
  • Settings page, including moderation and mail notification options.
  • Customisable post form.
  • AJAX form handling.
  • Multi-language support.
  • Seamless integration with your current theme (knowledge of WordPress theming required).

How To Install & Use

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it up & running.

Requirements

In order to successfully use this plugin, you will need the following:

  • PHP 5 or higher
  • WordPress 3.3 or higher

Installation Steps

  1. Download the files
  2. Upload the files to /wp-content/plugins/
  3. Activate the plugin (WP-admin > Plugins > FV Community News)
  4. Enable the widgets, or use the shortcodes.

Widgets

There are three different widgets available:

  • Form: Displays the form to submit a post.
  • Posts: Displays a list of the most recent approved posts.
  • Tag Cloud: Displays a tag cloud of community post tags.

Shortcodes

Shortcodes can be used in a regular post or page. There are three different
shortcodes available:

  • [fvcn-post-form]: Displays the form to submit a post.
  • [fvcn-recent-posts]: Displays a list of the most recent approved posts.
  • [fvcn-tag-cloud]: Displays a tag cloud of community post tags.

Theme Integration

It is possible to seamlessly integrate the plugin with your current theme. To do this
follow the next steps:

  1. Copy the contents of /fv-community-news/fvcn-theme/ to the directory of your current theme.
  2. Modify the files you just copied to match your theme. By default the files are setup for the default WordPress theme (Twenty Eleven).

And thats all! The plugin will automatically detect the new files and use those instead
of the default files.

Updating From Version 2.x

Version 2 and older are not compatible with version 3 and later. To convert your posts
to work with the new version, download the FV Community News Upgrader.

If you’re still using version 1.x, you will have to update to version 2 first.

Example

If you would like a live demo of the plugin, be sure to check out DivitoDesign.com, which has a huge archive of community news.

Bugs

If you find any bug in the latest version of this plugin, I hope you’d be so kind to tell me about it. This will only improve the plugin, which is better for the users! You can do this on the bug reports forum.

Help Needed?

If you need any help, or have problems with this plugin, please create a post on the support forums.

Plugin Info

AUTHOR: Frank Verhoeven
AUTHOR URL: http://www.frank-verhoeven.com/
WORDPRESS VERSION: 3.3+
TESTED UP TO: 3.4.1
CURRENT VERSION: 3.0.1

Change log

If you are interested in the changes this plugin has had, please check out the changelog on the official WordPress page.

Download

DOWNLOAD: FV Community News

Support

If this plugin is helpful to you, please consider supporting it! You can help it’s development by making a small donation, or promote it by putting a link to this page on your site. Appreciate it!

September 30, 2008

318 thoughts on “WordPress Plugin – FV Community News”

  1. Brandon on January 9, 2011 at 12:13 PM said:

    I will try this plugins for my site ;)

  2. Pikkals on January 10, 2011 at 5:47 PM said:

    Hi there

    Can you give me an indication on when your new version will be out? Or can I download the beta 2 version and try that? Is is stable?

  3. Ayaz Malik on January 14, 2011 at 3:49 AM said:

    Hey, awesome plugin !
    is there a way to call news from a specific user, using user id or username ?
    Cheers

  4. Hafteh Mag on January 19, 2011 at 11:14 AM said:

    Hello and thank you for very good plugin
    I wonder how come I can read my two page only 5 News?
    can I change number of news, if so where?
    Can I give information on email (only links and news title .. no email)?
    Thanks

    Hallo und danke für sehr gut plugin
    ich habe 2 fragen wieso kann ich meine Seite nur 5 News lesen?
    kann ich anzahl news ändern, wenn ja wo?
    Kann ich auf Email angaben verzichten(nur Links und News Titel.. kein Email)?
    Danke

  5. jo on May 13, 2011 at 2:20 PM said:

    Hi,
    I just updated the plugin today and I cant edit the settings. There arent any to edit actually!
    I want to change the word count that is visible on the sidebar and the amount of posts seen on the ‘view news page……..

    1. Frank on May 14, 2011 at 2:18 PM said:

      Hey Jo,

      Some of the options have been removed in version 2.0. The reason for this, is the new custom template feature.

      This feature allows you to make the changes you want, and a lot more! While it is not documented very well at this point, some information on it can be found in the readme.txt. (I couldn’t wait with the release until the documentation was done :) )

      The code you need to modify the number of posts is the following:

      Select Code
      1

      fvcn_has_posts(array('num'=>5))

      Where you change the 5 in the number you want on your site.

      Please let me know if you have more questions, and I will try to answer them as soon as possible!

      Frank

  6. Scott on May 17, 2011 at 1:22 AM said:

    Suddenly today the news headline font is different and BIG and headlines won’t allow use of anything but alphabetic or numberic characters. That eliminates apostrophes, dollar signs, etc. etc. What happened???

  7. Mark on May 19, 2011 at 7:28 PM said:

    This plugin looks fantastic. I’m wondering if the entries are kept in the post table or another table specifically for this?

  8. Mark on May 19, 2011 at 7:33 PM said:

    Oh, one other question: can you limit it to registered users, and if so, of a certain user level? Seems like if not, it would fill with spam.

    If not in the plugin, would it work to out the submission for on a page that can only be viewed by a registered user of a specific level? I believe there are plugins for doing that.

    1. Frank on May 20, 2011 at 8:47 PM said:

      The entries are kept in a table just for the plugin. Spam protection is build-in, and can even be configured to work with Akismet.
      If that still does not filter out all the spam, you can require posters to be logged in.

  9. mark scott on May 21, 2011 at 9:27 AM said:

    Hi Frank;
    I would like to add image submission to the standard template. Where is the template that I need to modify? thanks mark

    1. Frank on May 21, 2011 at 5:21 PM said:

      Hey Mark,

      With version 2.0, the support for image uploading had been dropped. If you really need it you could use the older, 1.3.1, version.

  10. Waheed Akhtar on May 27, 2011 at 11:38 PM said:

    Hi,

    I am using this plugin on my blog and thanks for this great plugin.

    I have news section in my sidebar (rightside) for post pages and it shows full description for every news. I want to limit the description words (e.g. 100) in the sidebar.

    Any help is much appreciated.

    Thanks

    1. Frank on May 29, 2011 at 1:35 PM said:

      Hey Waheed,

      You will have to create a custom template, see this page for more info.

      Modify the list-posts.php file and replace fvcn_post_content() with fvcn_post_excerpt().

  11. Job on May 28, 2011 at 2:14 PM said:

    FV Community News is a very nice plugin, but the RSS feed doesn’t run: “page not found” on mysite.com/fv-community-news-rss, is there a solution ?

    Thanks

  12. Job on May 28, 2011 at 2:33 PM said:

    Ok, it runs if I tape mysite.com/?feed=fv-community-news-rss , strange because I have permalinks activated. Anyway, thank you from FR for this awesome plugin ;)

  13. Job on May 29, 2011 at 8:16 PM said:

    Hello Frank, I have just a little question: when a user posts news via FV Community News, the form closes (from bottom to top) without any confirmation message, is it possible to add a little message ? Thanks !

  14. Job on May 30, 2011 at 2:35 AM said:

    Sorry but I have a little problem: On Internet Explorer and Firefox, when we click on “submit”, the news is submitted but nothing happens on the form, the user doesn’t know that it has worked because the form doesn’t close :/

    All is fine on Chrome. I presume that there is a problem of compatibility but I don’t find it…

    You can test on the URL I’ve let on my comment, I’ve put a moderation so do not hesitate to see by yourself if you have time ;)

    Thanks

  15. samuel on June 29, 2011 at 2:24 PM said:

    Hello,
    I’m using your plugin,
    it works just perfectly but I wanted to load the new’s form by ajax and at this time the java doesn’t handle the submit event so I had to change the binding method by “live” in add-posts.js
    $('#fvcn-add-post').live('submit',function() {

    Maybe this little improevement can interest you ?

    Samuel

  16. jo on July 5, 2011 at 7:51 PM said:

    Hi, I m havving difficulty changing the number of news posts on my page. I have read your read me text. On my page I have the code :
    I cant add the php scripts to the page, what am I doing wrong?

  17. Leanne Romak on September 7, 2011 at 4:31 PM said:

    I am very happy with this plugin, but I am unable to edit Submissions. I can go into Edit mode, but there is no update button. The rest of the site is editable from the WordPress dashboard. Thanks.

  18. Leanne Romak on September 7, 2011 at 6:17 PM said:

    Sorry, ignore my last question, it was a server side issue causing the button to be missing. Thanks again for a great plugin.

  19. Shane Craig on September 19, 2011 at 5:23 AM said:

    You know, if you added the ability for users to vote submissions up and down you’d have that reddit/digg cloning plugin so many of us have been looking for.. ;) Tremendous plugin though!

  20. Andriy Molchanov on March 8, 2012 at 2:10 AM said:

    Hi there,
    I’ve got some problem with your plugin.
    I could not see the previous & next numbers of news posts on my page. I’m already put all your codes to my word press page and I can see form, news posts but not Archive. Can I get any help? Thank you.
    Andrew.
    My word press page you can find here: http://www.mississauga.ru/объявления/?preview=true&preview_id=56&preview_nonce=7e01eb0e48

    1. Frank on March 8, 2012 at 1:51 PM said:

      The pagination will appear when there are more then ten posts. (The archive will display ten posts per page)

    2. Sri Ganesh.M on August 20, 2012 at 8:51 PM said:

      Thank you for the Plugin, but i approved 30 post, still shows only 10 post and old post are not visible.

      Link: http://www.animhut.com/submit/

    3. Frank on August 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM said:

      The archives are located here: http://www.animhut.com/submit/archive/.

  21. Akash on August 18, 2012 at 11:11 AM said:

    Hey guyz i used this plugin on my last blog which i i sell last month and the plugin was working very fine on it i was having no problems at all.

  22. Paul Olyslager on August 18, 2012 at 5:31 PM said:

    Hi Frank,

    thank you for the update. One problem: I’ve been trying to switch my posts to the latest version with the version upgrader plugin. The website went into maintenance mode as you explained, but nothing has changed ever since for the last 20 minutes.

    What should I do?

    1. Paul Olyslager on August 19, 2012 at 9:13 AM said:

      Seems like deleting the .maintenance file (hidden) in the root folder of your website does the trick.
      Also, I receive the message “The function “fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions()” is deprecated!. Which function should I use to display 3 news items?

    2. Frank on August 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM said:

      See: http://www.frank-verhoeven.com/fv-community-news-3-0-beta-1/comment-page-1/#comment-31413 :)