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!