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”

@Gary
The reason that it doesn’t add the tag automaticly, is to keep the most customizablility as possible. Now it is possible to add classes, nofollow and other atributes to the tag.

@MyDesignBytes
I get your point, but what if an user has used the widgets, then the files should be included on every page, so I think this the way it is now is the best one.

@Roy
1 - If you use the new tags, you don’t need Exec-PHP 2 - You can add some rules of CSS code to your style.css file, overriding the CSS in the plugin’s CSS file.

Thank you all for your comments!
Frank Verhoeven | January 4th, 2009
I have 2 questions about the plugin:

1) I paste the code

in a static page and form doesn’t appears but appears same code (I use Exec-PHP).

2) The width of the column of my blog is 150. How do I reduce the form’s width ?

In any case your plugin is fantastic. Good job
thanks for your attention
Roy | January 1st, 2009
I think it’s a great plugin, I just wish it wasn’t called on every single page. Should just load .js and .css on the pages you input the code. Not that there big files, but it’s just one more thing to weigh down a site, especially if you have thirty plus plugins [ not me, I hate plugins ]

Great idea to build repeat traffic and it’s free SEO <- Search engines will love this; and you don’t even have to lift a finger.
mydesignbytes | December 31st, 2008
[...] FV Community News [...]
En.nicuilie.eu Blogs » Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors | December 31st, 2008
Never mind. I figured it out with this:

On %submission_date% %submission_date%, %submission_author% suggested %submission_url%>
%submission_description%

I entered the <a href= string to capture the string as a URL and then reissued the %submission_url% to create the hyper link. It would be nice if it did that automatically. But, I may have messed something up Thanks again for a cool plug in.
Gary Novosel | December 31st, 2008
If you look at the only link I’ve posted and mouse over the URL, I’ve entered a competitive web site in the URL field and in the admin screen it allows me to view the correct site. On the production blog it puts in the base url for my web site instead of the url entered in the submission screen.
Gary Novosel | December 31st, 2008
[...] FV Community News [...]
4webmasters » Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors | December 31st, 2008
Hey, it’s all good now. Don’t know why it wasn’t working at first
Paul Dogley | December 30th, 2008
@Zazo
I have send you an email.

@Paul
Can you see the RSS feed using a browser? Or does it never show up? I have also noticed that when you are using the feedburner plugin, you can’t reach the feed anymore.
Frank Verhoeven | December 14th, 2008