Lee Turner

I noticed that the Google Reader team tweeted today about the fact that you can now embed "Share in Reader" links on your site. As it seams you can never have too many ways to share the content of your blog these days I thought I would spend a few minutes and have a play with this for b2evolution. If you are happy to open up your skin files then you can add the following in a location of your choice to get the "Share in Reader" link:

PHP:

You can obviously add the appropriate images etc to make this look nicer and it wouldn't be too hard to wrap all this up in a b2evolution plugin if there is a desire for that kind of thing. If you are going to hack about with your skin files, make sure you back them up first

Best,

It is amazing what can happen when a simple bit of code is looked at by a group of talented developers..... Hot on the heels of the previous Twitterlution update we now have another one by ¥åßßå.

Right from the start Twitterlution was reliant on a PHP extension called curl which allowed the plugin to talk to twitter. This was OK for the majority of people but every so often a b2evo user would find that their host hadn't enabled curl on their PHP installation, which effectively meant that they couldn't use the plugin. As of this release, the plugin will use curl if it is there but if not fall back to a way that doesn't use a php extension. This is very cool as it opens up the plugin to more people.

The second update is the addition of a new placeholder that will get replaced when your message is posted through to twitter. Now the $title$, $excerpt$ and $url$ placeholders will be replaced appropriately. The Excerpt field can be found on the Expert tab when writing a new post.

These new features have been included into the b2evolution 3.2.0-beta version and for 2.4.x user, go get the plugin from the Twitterlution plugin page and enjoy.

Thanks again ¥åßßå for the update

Best,

Sometimes when we are troubleshooting problems it is useful to know a little bit more information about a users setup. Getting them to run a phpinfo() is one way to do this as it will give you pages and pages of the way the user has php setup on their host. However, running this command is not always easy for some users so having come across this very recently I figured why not stick with what they know and put a little b2evolution plugin together that lists out the extensions that PHP currently knows about.

At this point in time all this plugin does is list out the extensions as this is all I needed at the time. It wouldn't be too hard to add other information if there is a need so leave a comment if there is anything else that you would like to know.

Download the PHP Extensions Plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and install it via the Global Settings tab. Read the readme file and post a comment here with any questions.

There is a lot going on in the b2evolution world at the moment what with the release of b2evo 3.2.0-beta "Woodland Hills" & b2evo 2.4.7-stable "Tilman". You should definitely check these releases out and consider upgrading when 3.2.0 comes out of beta as it looks like a pretty cool update.

One of the really cool things about b2evo version 3.2.0 is that the Twitterlution plugin is now included by default. This means that b2evo users get Twitter integration right out of the box. When the plugin was included a few updates were made to improve the plugin along with integrating it with some of the new 3.2.0 features like per blog settings. Unfortunately due to using these new features the plugin is no longer compatible with the 2.4.x versions of b2evo. I have therefore take the improvements and included them in a 2.4.x compatible version of the plugin for those who can't or don't want to upgrade their blogs to the latest version of b2evo.

For those of you using a 2.4.x version of b2evo go get the plugin from the Twitterlution plugin page and for those using the latest 3.2.0 use the plugin that is included by default.

Best,

In the spirit of doing one thing and doing it well - this plugin allows you to add the Google Webmaster verify meta tag to the <head></head> of your skin. Nothing more, nothing less

Settings

Meta Tag Name: This is the name of the meta tag as specified on the "Verify a Site" page in Google Webmaster. This defaults to 'verify-v1' as this is what Google always calls it but make sure any way and change it if it is different.

Meta Tag Content: The content of the meta tag as specified on the "Verify a Site" page in Google Webmaster. This will be the random letters between the quotes.

Download the Google Webmaster Plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and install it via the Global Settings tab. Read the readme file and update your settings. Post a comment here with any questions.