Wordpress Plugin - FV Community News

Posted by Frank Verhoeven | 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:

Widget Ready (Different form/results widget)
Tags for use in posts/pages
AJAX Form Handling
Multi-Language Support
Moderation panel (with email option) - Make sure you approve the right articles
Edit Submissions
`My Submissions` Page
Customizable templates
Captcha Spam protection (on/off)
Akismet Spam protection (API key required)
Build-in RSS 2.0 Feed
Image Uploading
Settings
Uninstall Page
Configurable Responses

How To Install & Use

Download the files
Upload the files to /wp-content/plugins
Activate the plugin (WP-admin > Plugins > FV Community News)
Browse Community News > Settings to select the settings you prefer.
Go to Design > Widgets to add the Community News widgets to your sidebar.

You can also show your Community News plugin on a static page. You can do that by placing the following codes on a page that does support PHP:

Add Form

<?php if (function_exists('fvCommunityNewsForm'))

    fvCommunityNewsForm(); ?>

Latest Submissions

<?php if (function_exists('fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions'))
    echo fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions(Number, Template); ?>

Number - Insert number of items you would like to show here
Template - Structure per item. You can use these tags:

%submission_author%

%submission_author_email%

%submission_title%

%submission_url%

%submission_description%

%submission_date%

%submission_image%

By default the Template is: ‘<li><h3><a href="%submission_url%" title="%submission_title%">%submission_title%</a></h3><p>%submission_description%</p><small>%submission_date%</small></li>‘. <ul> </ul> tags are automatically added.

Example

Take a look at the sidebar, you could see the plugin in action right there. Also my friend uses Community News on his blog, so you can see a working example on DivitoDesign.

The FV Community News settings page.

Bugs & Questions

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! When you have anything else to say (appreciated!), please comment!

Plugin Info

AUTHOR: Frank Verhoeven
AUTHOR URL: http://www.frank-verhoeven.com/
WORDPRESS VERSION: 2.5+
TESTED UP TO: 2.7
CURRENT VERSION: 1.3

Change log

Version 1.1
Version 1.2
Version 1.3

Download

DOWNLOAD: FV Community News

Donate

Like this plugin? Please consider making a small donation.

Or help promoting it by adding a link to this page, definitely appreciated !

Share and Enjoy:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Wordpress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

74 Responses to “Wordpress Plugin - FV Community News”

Yes I saw, I made a little mistake with the path to the images. A fix is on it’s way
Frank Verhoeven | November 13th, 2008
After update to 1.2.1 , when I tried to post news … after clicking on ‘Post’ there was ‘… loading’ message but no news were posted, the script hanged at loading…

Thanks
Zazo | November 12th, 2008
[...] FV Community News - Este plugin permite aos seus utilizadores que adicionem artigos na sidebar ou noutro local do seu blog. Este plugin oferece ainda uma página de gestão e uma de configuração, sendo que poderá controlar tudo aquilo que é submetido. [...]
30 plugins Wordpress de grande qualidade lançados em Outubro de 2008 | Wordpress Love - Themes, Plugins e tudo para Wordpress, em Português | November 7th, 2008
[...] Wordpress Plugin - FV Community News [...]
Best Design Resources of October 2008 | CrazyLeaf Design Blog | November 2nd, 2008
Hi Neuville,

I have fixed the problem you mentioned and submitted version 1.2.1 to wp.org. After a minute or so it should be available for download.

Thanks for reporting that issue!
Frank Verhoeven | November 2nd, 2008
hello, nice plugin, just a note: I’m getting an error whrn logging in with a user profile:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /path/wp-content/plugins/fv-community-news/fvCommunityNews.php on line 1017

users are not able to edit / view their submissions

using WP 2.6.2

ciao!
neuville | November 2nd, 2008
Well, I actualy planned to create this for version 1.2, but pushed it up to the next version. Anyway thanks for the tip!
Frank Verhoeven | October 31st, 2008
i’m new to this whole WP thing but doesn’t it make sense to create shorttags for insertion of the “add form” and “latest submissions” rather than having people mod a page.php file ?

that way people can create a page in WP, then put something like [FV PLUGIN] or something and they’re good to go?

pardon me if this is a stupid question…
quick question | October 31st, 2008
hi. Thanks for plugin

perfect.

Regards
baron | October 31st, 2008
[...] FV Community News est un plugin conçu par Frank Verhoeven. Il est toujours difficile de parler de tout et de ne pas louper d’articles intéressants, avec ce plug-in cela n’arrivera plus. Le plug-in permet de laisser vos visiteurs proposer leurs liens vers un article intéressants. Bien entendu le formulaire est équipé d’une Captcha pour éviter le spam, de plus comme pour les commentaires, les propositions passent d’abord par un espace modération et libre à vous de valider ou pas le lien, il est possible d’autoriser automatiquement les contributeurs ayant déjà proposé des liens validés. [...]
FV Community News FR, Rendez votre blog vivant ! | le blogueur masqué | October 29th, 2008
Nice solution
Frank Verhoeven | October 27th, 2008
Thanks Frank, I know that gziped files wont work for visitors using Safari.
Here is the solution I implemented (.htaccess file):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#Check to see if browser can accept gzip files.
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
#make sure there’s no trailing .gz on the url
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$
#check to see if a .gz version of the file exists.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
#All conditions met so add .gz to URL filename (invisibly)
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [QSA,L]

Basically, if browser can’t accept gzip files, ‘regular’ files are served. All I needed is open source 7-Zip to gzip ‘regular’ files.
Tomas | October 23rd, 2008
Hi Christopher,

If you want to do this now you have to modify the code, but I decided to make the URL field optional in the next release. Witch (I hope) will be released somewhere in the next two weeks.
Frank Verhoeven | October 23rd, 2008