I know its been pretty quiet round here for a bit. Its just been one of those periods of time when I’d nothing really to write about, and even if I did I didn’t really have the time, or the motivation, or the energy.

When I’ve not been working I’ve been bashing my head against the wall over my Wordbooker plugin which I’ve been playing a continual catch up game with Facebook and WordPress and W3C compliance (some of which was nothing to do with me but actually Facebook’s decision to use non compliant tags and people having WordPress themes with not quite the right Doctypes and other things). I’ve been wanting for ages to start on Version 2 of the plugin – which takes a different approach to parts of the posting process and needs a complete re-write of the comment handling process too, but until I’d got the 1.x code base to the point that it was stable enough to leave alone so I could concentrate on 2.0 I couldn’t do that. I’d just got ready to start recoding when Facebook announced they were changing the method of authenticating users against applications… that’s right. Just a couple of months after they changed it totally they are proposing changing it all again. It didn’t help that they accidentally turned on the new method and broke everything!

But things seem to have settled down and so I’ve started coding it, but I also wanted to watch “Travelling Man” which Nick had bought me on DVD for my birthday after we’d both read Andrew Denny’s blog entry about it. It’s been quite enjoyable watching it and recognising a lot of the locations, even if they have changed a lot since it was shot : for example the derelict warehouses near Preston Brook have been turned in to rather up market apartments – but it was good to see that Claymore Navigation’s boatyard hasn’t changed much in the intervening years.

So today I’m having a day off work, and I could be coding but instead I’m listening to Bob Geldof’s solo albums and trying to rustle up enough motivation to do much more than slouch on the sofa all day. I know that some would say that NOT listening to them would be enough motivation to get off the sofa, and others might say that listening to them just sucks motivation away from you, but hey… it’s my day off and I’m waiting for the Dishwasher to go through a cleaning cycle!

Nick commented once about some of the code in CanalPlan AC and how it was suffering from “bit rot”. Basically code that you shoved in, often as a quick dirty fix and then it starts to fail but with no good reason.

Well Wordbooker is suffering from bit rot, its just that luckily no-one has noticed it yet, well apart from me that is.

Wordbooker took code written by Robert Tsai for his plugin (Wordbook) and extended it. That is why Wordbooker is called Wordbooker – because it stands for WordbookE[xtended]R[elease]. Robert’s code used to support the WordPress PHP libraries for PHP4 and PHP5. PHP4 support was dropped but the wrappers were left inside the code, adding a level of abstraction around the calls to the Facebook PHP libraries.

When I added all the new features such as posting to walls and FB widgets and so on, into his code I sometimes used his wrappers and sometimes made the calls directly.

Facebook then depreciated some functionality and so calls to functions supporting that got commented out and eventually I stripped most of the code out.

I’d added functionality to handle comments really as a sort of proof of concept and then I added posting support to pages, but comments to pages didn’t get processed properly due to slight differences inside FB on how pages are handled.

So that was the next big project – re-write comment handling to make it a lot more robust (and at the same time simpler).

But then Facebook came along with the Graph API and the Oauth authentication process and said that all applications would be force migrated to the new Authentication method on June 1st. The new Graph API would make my job simpler as I only use a few calls (post to wall, post comment, get comment, get status, and a few FQL calls) and so obviously I should think about moving my code to use it.

That wouldn’t be bad if the Graph API was complete and not riddled with bugs (for example if you include a link in a post it thinks you are doing a “share” style post and goes and scrapes that URL – something which is not right and not how the old API works), but as it is I can’t use the new API for anything but authentication, so I’ve had to work out how to use the Oauth method for signing on, but then use the old API for the rest of my code, all under the looming date of the end of the month and with me working a day job as well.

Facebook also changed their policy on posting to walls and I asked them for clarification, and they asked for more information which I’ve given them, and now I’m waiting to hear back from them. It could mean that I have to change my code, but actually it will make the process easier to code and make it easier for the user to understand, so I am going to make the changes any way.

WordPress is also changing – with 3.0 coming out really soon now – and I wanted to make my install more multiblog friendly : so 4 tables per WP install rather than 4 tables per blog which means some quite jolly logic to work out if you are in WP2 (or WPMU2) or WP3 (running in single or multiple blog mode)

So I’m revisiting my old code and wondering if I should really throw 80% of it away and strip away the crud and spaghetti that seems to have collected during my rapid development of the project. I’ve now got a much clearer idea of how things should work and how the code should flow, and how to code round the countless “failures” of the FB back end which occur at depressingly frequently intervals, some of which I did last night when a couple of users were basically stuck because FB were playing round with code on the live servers again.

I’d been using the Wordbook app for quite a bit but I’d always found that it lacked some features that I liked. I’ve now added these functions and got it doing things how I’d like.

So rather than keep cluttering up the original wordbook application page I’ve forked by code off totally.

I created a new Facebook application called Wordbooker and then created a new plugin called Wordbooker in the WordPress Extensions site.

Upgrading from the Forked Version.

As this is basically a new application its a bit messy as doing a normal removal of the old forked version will remove any record of posts/comments made with the forked version.

If you wish to retain that history then you need to back up the existing wordbook_postcomments table BEFORE you remove the forked version of wordbook.

Go into the options page for Wordbook and reset the configuration for wordbook

From the plugins page de-activate the wordbook plugin.

Delete the wordbook directory from wp-content/plugins

Upload the wordbooker directory into the wp-content/plugins directory

Go into the Plugins page and enable Wordbooker.

Go to the options page for Wordbooker and  it will ask you to get a login key from Facebook and then ask you to grant two extra permissions needed by Wordbooker – these allow Wordbooker to publish to your wall and also to fetch comments from it.

Click on the Save Configuration button.

You can then set up the various options on the option screen:

Wordbooker Options page

** Multiple Facebook account / WordPress account support **

If you as the blog owner only want it so that WP posts go to your FB account then go into the Options screen and set the default account to be yours, and that should be it, any person using a different WP account to post to your blog will publish those stories to your FB account.

But what if you’ve got a Family WB where different people would like to post to WP and to their OWN FB accounts. Simply get each of them to login to WP as themselves and configure WB as if they were the only user. Then when all of them have done this go back in as yourself and set the Default account to be you.

On the Edit Post page there is a WordBook Options block which includes a drop down list of the blog you wish to post to, if you want to post to your default blog then you don’t need to touch this but if someone wants to post that post to their FB account all they need to do is pick their name from the drop down list before they post.

** Length of Extract **
This allows you to change the length of the extract posted to Facebook. The minimum value is 200 and the maximum is 400 (at the moment) with the default being 256 characters. The extract will be trimmed to the nearest full word BELOW this value.

** Default Publish Post to Facebook **

This allows you to choose if posts should automatically be posted to Facebook. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page

** Post Attribute **

This allows you to change the attribute line when posts are sent to Facebook. By default this is set to “Posted a new post on their blog”. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

** Republish Post if edited more than x days ago **

This allows you to control how long it should be before Wordbook considers an edited post to be a “new” post and re-publishes it to Facebook.

** Override Re-Publication window  **

This allows to to force all edits to be reposted to Facebook ignoring the republish window. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

** Update Facebook Status **
If this option is checked then the title of your blog post and its permalink will be posted to your status, along with the text specified here. This can be overridden from the Edit Post page. NOTE: If this option is Selected then your status is ALWAYS updated, even if you choose NOT to publish your post to Facebook.

** Import Comments from Facebook for Wordbook Posts  **

This version of Wordbook supports the importing of comments made on Facebook back into your WordPress blog. This allows you to set the default behaviour. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page

** Auto Approve imported comments **

If you trust your friends on Facebook then you’re probably quite happy for their comments to automatically get posted as comments on your WordPress blog. If this option is not set then any imported comments are held in the moderation queue.

Once you’ve got the options set how you want then save them.

If you exported the wordbook_postcomments table before upgrading then you can now import it back into the database.

There may be times when you you are posting a blog entry and you’d like to do something differently, like NOT publish a post, or change your choice on what you do with comment. So on the Add New and Edit posts page you should now find a Wordbooker Options Override block where you can override several defaults:

Wordbooker Post options

If you are the administrator of a Facebook Fan page then you’ll also be given the option of posting to that page instead of posting to your own wall. At the moment there is a bug in the API which means that posts made to Fan Pages are shown as YOU posting on the Fan Page wall – rather than it looking like the Fan Page has posted the post directly.

PROBLEMS

If you’ve got problems its probably best to post them on the Wordbooker Page on Facebook where people can create new threads for each bug/problem and people can easily see if any fixes have been made

Well I’ve been hard at work on my forked version of the Wordbook plugin which links your own hosted WordPress Blog with your Facebook account. Oh and it also works with WordPress MU too.

Its now really reached a point where I’m quite happy with it.

So what does it now support?

Multiple Facebook account / WordPress account support

If you have multiple users of your blog the old version wouldn’t post to YOUR Facebook account. It would post to THEIRS, if they had set it up. This version of the plugin now handles multiple WP Accounts. If you as the blog owner only want it so that WP posts go to your FB account then go into the Options screen and set the default account to be yours, and that should be it, any person using a different WP account to post to your blog will publish those stories to your FB account.

But what if you’ve got a Family WordPress where different people would like to post to WP and to their OWN FB accounts. Simply get each of them to login to WP as themselves and configure WB as if they were the only user. Then when all of them have done this go back in as yourself and set the Default account to be you.

On the Edit Post page there is a WordBook Options block which includes a drop down list of the blog you wish to post to, if you want to post to your default blog then you don’t need to touch this but if someone wants to post that post to their FB account all they need to do is pick their name from the drop down list before they post.

Length of Extract

This allows you to change the length of the extract posted to Facebook. The minimum value is 200 and the maximum is 400 (at the moment) with the default being 256 characters. The extract will be trimmed to the nearest full word BELOW this value.

Default Publish Post to Facebook

This allows you to choose if posts should automatically be posted to Facebook. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page

Post Attribute

This allows you to change the attribute line when posts are sent to Facebook. By default this is set to “Posted a new post on their blog”. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

Republish Post if edited more than x days ago

This allows you to control how long it should be before Wordbook considers an edited post to be a “new” post and re-publishes it to Facebook.

Override Re-Publication window

This allows to to force all edits to be reposted to Facebook ignoring the republish window. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

Update Facebook Status

If this option is checked then the title of your blog post and its permalink will be posted to your status, along with the text specified here. This can be overridden from the Edit Post page. NOTE: If this option is Selected then your status is ALWAYS updated, even if you choose NOT to publish your post to Facebook.

Import Comments from Facebook for Wordbook Posts

This version of Wordbook supports the importing of comments made on Facebook back into your WordPress blog. This allows you to set the default behaviour. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

Auto Approve imported comments

If you trust your friends on Facebook then you’re probably quite happy for their comments to automatically get posted as comments on your WordPress blog. If this option is not set then any imported comments are held in the moderation queue.

Posting using XMLRPC clients

Posts published to your WordPress account using XMLRPC clients will now also publish to Facebook – if the default option of posting to Facebook is set. Posts made via this method will also pick up the default target Facebook account, the default post attribute line, and the Update Status options.

Upgrading from the stock version obtained from the WordPress plugins repository:

* You need to de-activate the old plug in first.
* Then DELETE the wordbook folder from wp-content/plugins and then upload the new version. DON’T just copy the new files up.
* Re-activate the plugin
* Go to the Options page for the plugin and you can set all the new wizzy options. If you want to pull comments from your Facebook account you’ll need to grant the plugin permission to read from your stream. If you don’t grant this permission then you can’t pull comments, and I’ve no idea what my code will do if it tries to do that because I didn’t test it! So you have been warned!

Debugging

The only place I’ve put any real debugging in is in the cron job code because its very hard to actually work out if its working if there are no comments to pull. Debugging for that can be enabled by editing two lines in wordbook_cron.php:

define (’DEBUG’, false); which you change to true

and

$debug_file=’/tmp/wordbook_’.$table_prefix.’debug’; which you may need to change if you want to change the output directory.

So where is it I here you ask?

Right Here:

wordbook1.5

Back in August I wrote about the Wordbook plugin for WordPress which basically replicates posts from your own hosted WordPress (or WordPress MU) blog into your Facebook account where they appeared on your wall.

The plugin did something well but it lacked several things that I’d like it to do. So I started adding them. The sidebar widget was the easiest thing to do as that was pretty much self contained and as you can see from this blog its working quite well.

The plugin had a very annoying habit of re-posting a post if you edited after more than a few days and it seemed to publish posts to Facebook when you’d least expect it.

So I rehashed that code and got it all working.

But everything was hard coded. What if I wanted to force it to republish a post to Facebook when I edited it, what if I wanted to automatically republish if editing after 10 days, except that I didn’t want it to do it for a specific post.

That was all the easy stuff.

But what about comments? Wouldn’t it be cool if comments posted on your Facebook copy of the post could be pulled down into your blog as comments to that post. Sure it would be cool, and it wouldn’t be that difficult would it.

WRONG!

The plugin used the Feed.publishUserAction API call. Its a neat little function but it doesn’t return the Post ID for the post you just made into facebook, and you need the Post ID to pull comments back. The obvious answer was to use the stream.publish API call instead. That returns the Post ID and then you can simply get the comments by using Stream.getComments and passing it the post ID in question. To get all of that working I needed to grab the latest version of the API files and I had to recode the way the plugin posts as Stream.Publish uses a different structure for a post.

So once all that was working and I’d coded up a nice options page and put an option block on the Edit/Add Posts page so you can override some defaults (like saying you DON’T want to import comments for a post) all that was left was to code up a comment fetching job and work with WP-CRON to schedule it.

I finished all of that a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been debugging it since but now I think its probably ready to escape into the wild and if anyone is mad enough to want to test it then Here it is

Some quick notes on Upgrading from the existing Wordbook plugin.

• You need to de-activate the old plug in first.
• Then DELETE the wordbook folder from wp-content/plugins and then upload the new version. DONT just copy the new files up.
• Re-activate the plugin
• Go to the Options page for the plugin and you can set all the new wizzy options. If you want to pull comments from your Facebook account you’ll need to grant the plugin permission to read from your stream. If you don’t grant this permission then you can’t pull comments, and I’ve no idea what my code will do if it tries to do that because I didn’t test it! So you have been warned!

Debugging.
The only place I’ve put any real debugging in is in the cron job code because its very hard to actually work out if its working if there are no comments to pull. Debugging for that can be enabled by editing two lines in wordbook_cron.php:

define (‘DEBUG’, false); which you change to true
and
$debug_file=’/tmp/wordbook_’.$table_prefix.’debug’; which you may need to change if you want to change the output directory.

Caveats

You knew there would be some didn’t you!

I developed this on WordPress MU which is the MultiUser version of WordPress. I developed it  using 2.8.4a which is the same as 2.8.4 in standard WordPress. I HAVE NOT tested it on older versions so I cannot guarantee things like the draggable box on the Edit/Add Page will work if you are not on V2.8.4

As I’ve now sort of released this plugin I’ve created a page where I’ll log any changes to it in future. So if you want to keep upto date then you’ll need to check my Wordbook Page

Warning: This post contains material of a technical nature, if you start reading and feel dizzy or nauseous then stop reading immediately and go and lie down.

This is a follow up to my previous post where I outlined a prototype of an extension for WPMU which allowed posting to multiple blogs from one centralised POP3 account which collected all posts from all users of all blogs. This is very different from the usual way of doing it where you either go out to get the emails from external email addresses or you have multiple local accounts.

Well the prototype has, like Frankenstein’s Monster, come alive and it’s now got configuration screens and lots of rich techy goodness to it.

I’m not going to go over the instructions on how to configure the MTA again, those are documented on my last post, and in the notes in the downloadable archive :

Post by Email Post by Email-v1.zip

The Archive also contains instructions on where the TWO files need to be placed for the system to work.

What I’m going to cover here is the new features that I’ve added since the last post. Yes I have way too much time on my hands, but this is keeping my brain sharp so its all good at the end of the day.

These can be broken down into to distinct groups which are reflected in the two new options that will appear on the Settings menu:

Blog Level Options

These are options which are set by the blog administrator or blog owner:

Default Category for posts : This is a drop down of all categories and you select one to be the default category for posts without a category override

Optional Categories: This is a tick box list of all other categories in your blog, Toggle the ones you want users to be able to use in their category override.

Allow Posting By:  This is a tick box list of all the user who are members of your blog. Toggle the ones you want to be able to use the post by email. This will include YOUR address and by default no-one of them are checked (which basically deactivates the system for your specific blog).

User Level Options

These are options which are set on a user by user basis.

Personal Identifier : This is a optional text string which allows users to “secure” their posts. If this has been set then posts from them will be rejected outright. So set this to something good but memorable as you’ll have to provide it for each post.

Alternative Email: This allows you to nominate a secondary email address which the system will accept emails from. If you do not set this then posts will only be accepted from the email address registered to your account.

Additional Posting options

To support the “new” features there are now some additional posting options which you set at the top of your email.

wppbm-categories: A comma separated list of category names for this post. NOTE: This is names not numbers which makes it easier to remember (or are you so sad that you know the underlying IDs of your categories). You’ll find a list of the available categories on your user settings page. So assuming that the Administrator has enabled them you could do something like: wppbm-categories : computing,witterings which would post your post with those categories. If you do not specify this line then the default category set by the Administrator will be applied.

wppbm-pid: Your PID. If you’ve set your PID then you have to provide it here. If you’ve set it and don’t include it (or get it wrong) then your post is toast!

So that’s basically it. I’ve created a dedicated Post by Email Page where I’ll always list the current version and the bug fixes/enhancements.

So download it, configure it and play with it and bounce bugs back to me as comments!

I posted previously about the Wordbook plugin for WordPress which links your WordPress blog to your Facebook account. I’d down loaded it and installed it and it worked quite well.

Then I wrote about how it reposted WordPress posts if you edited them. It only did this if they were more than a day old which seemed a bit odd. So I changed the code to stop it doing that.

Also I wanted to have a link back from my blog to my Facebook account so I wrote a very minimal sidebar widget to link the two together.

This morning I’ve been recoding the widget so that its more flexible

So my widget now supports:

• Widget title can be changed by the user, it’s no longer fixed as Facebook Status
• User can override the name displayed – so rather than using the name on Facebook you can display a different one. On Facebook my name is shown as Stephen, but if I want on my widget that could be replaced by “Steve” or Wombat, or anything!
• Different Date Formats. You can now select from a choice of date formats including a Facebook style textual one.

I might add some more formatting options such as changing the style of the status (currently fixed as italic).

To make sure that the widget and the plugin don’t get separated I’d coded my widget into the end of the plugin code and some people on the Wordbook group on Facebook have cut and pasted in to their copies of the plugin and it all seems to work.

But now my widget code is up to 179 or so lines and its getting a bit much to ask people to cut and paste it into their code. So I guess once I’ve got it tidied up a bit I’ll need to contact the developers of the plugin and get my code merged into the code base over on the WordPress plugins site.

Or if you want to try it now then follow these easy steps:

1. Download the widget code :wb_widget.php
2. Save the file into the wordbook directory under your plugins folder. Ensure you save/rename the file as wb_widget.php
3. Edit the main wordbook.php file and add the following line immediately preceding the closing ?> tag at the end of the file: include(“wb_widget.php”);

This also means that when I add features to the widget you just need to grab the latest version from here.

I got a bit bored so I did some hacking around with the code for the WordBook plugin.

It seemed to post to Facebook every time you did anything with a WordPress post such as editing, which isn’t really what you want it to do, so I went in and recoded the logic so that it only publishes to FaceBook on certain activities.

So now all I really need to do is test to see if it works properly!

So if you see some rather odd posts appearing and disappearing then that’s just me!

Well I thought I’d see how it goes. So I downloaded Wordbook and dropped it into the plugins folder and went through the configuration steps which were very simple and easy to follow and it claims to be installed properly.

Certainly my WPMU back end now knows my Facebook status, so it will be interesting to see how well it works pushing data into facebook.

The only thing that seems to be missing is a sidebar widget for WP so it could display your FB status there.

Things move fast in the WPMU world and now we’re on 2.8.2 which fixes a few minor problems

NOTE: Kieran has made a newer version of his plugin which works with WordPress MU and integrates by using an embedded Calendar tag to display the calendar.

So basically I’m abandoning this plug in and suggest you get Kieran’s new version instead. That is what I’ve put on this site.

This is basically Kieran O’Shea’s WP Calendar plugin for WordPress tweaked to work with WPMU with a couple of additional features.

1) Calendar table created for each user
2) The Calendar is wrapped to work in multiple templates without needing a file in each template. See the section below for more on this
3) Input and Display date formats on the Admin screen can be changed by the administrator.

Installation.

1) Drop the files from the archive into the matching folders in your WPMU installation
2) Edit the edit-calendar file and change the $eddateformat and $eddatesep variables to match your date format (by default it they are set to d/m/Y and / as I’m in the UK).
3) Enable the Plugin
4) Edit your .htaccess file and add the lines in the add.htaccess file towards the top
5) If you want to use my template wrapping then you need to use the wp-calendar.php file that I have provided along with the two tag files (edited to support your templates). If you dont want to use it then you need to install the calendar file manually into each template (but you dont need the tag files)

Template Wrapping.

I use Template Wrapping a lot – it allows me to easily drop cross blog functionality into the blogs without having to create a new page template in each blog. For example the calendar page only exists at the top level – there are NO files in any of the templates for the calendar, the structure of the page round the calendar is created using the two tag files and a couple of calls in the file containing the call to the calendar code

To enable template wrapping you need to do the following:

1) Drop the wp_opentags.php and wp_closetags.php files into the top level of your WPMU installation
2) Create a new file from the empty_page.php file
3) The new page can now be accessed from each blog.

You will find that you need to edit the wp_opentags and wp_closetags files to work with your templates. This can take a while due to the way different people build their templates and no hard and fast rules on opening and closing DIVs in the header,page and footer.

A Zip file of the various files including my wrapper files is available for download

If you have any comments, suggestions etc then please post them as comments.

You can see the calendar in action here

Well I’ve got version 1.0 of my Last.FM Widgets Plugin working. I’ve trimmed some of the extra bits out that Last.FM include in their plugs (just to make things tidy) but retained about 95% of what was there.

It supports all the standard lists and the two standard “Quilts”. One of more of the Widgets can probably be found in the side bars on this blog.

The options page allows you to configure your Last.FM ID, Select the colour (from Last.FM’s limited list) of the plugin and the size of the quilt.

I’ve tweaked it so that the plugin has a transparent background and should always be the same width as your side bar.

Its a normal Plugin so if you are using WPMU you can put it in the plugins folder. I’ve not tested it against standard WP but I can’t believe there is anything odd in there that would stop it working.

Please feel free to try it and let me know if there is anything obviously wrong with it:

You can download the latest version here

Update: Its now V1.6 – I’ve tidied up some of the code and removed some stuff that was no longer used! I’ve also added two Radio Widgets (artist like and Genre) and put these two options onto the general configuration page. At V1.6 I added a playlist widget

Well today I decided to pull over all my old posts from the blog on Camsigh.

Using the export and import features of WordPress made it a breeze.

Now all I have to do is go through all the posts, remove a few that are now redundant, put each post into the correct categories and then tag the posts with appropriate tags.

Well I sat down the other day and decided that I wasn’t happy with how Camsigh looked. I’d bolted a Blog mod onto the PHPBB forum and it was having problems with spammers and the code was rather messy. I’d also got functionality in the main board that I didn’t actually use – basically because it had been superceded by RSS feeds.

So I looked around and found that I liked WordPress and someone actually did a plug in that integrated it into PHPBB.

So some hacking around of WordPress and PHPBB and some tidying up and it all looked good.

To finish it all off I moved the board. Camsigh had been sitting in /board/ on one of my domains and I wanted to tidy things up so I registered another domain through DynDNS and made the appropriate adjustments inside the Board to get it working. I then put a rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the original directory to do forced re-writes to the new domain. Finally as I’d been doing all the reconfiguration work in a new database I had to export the user posts and private messages, search and replace any domain references (I use a PHPBB mod that allows you to upload and insert pictures) which had got buried in the posts.

Did I say that was it? Well it wasn’t: I then moved the posts from the old Blogging system into WordPress. Its not 100% correct but its near enough. There also seem to be a few navigational issues… which I’m looking into