Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

I think that just about everybody has a flickr account, and many of us want to put our photos on our blogs. Be it family photos or screen shots of video games and websites — they add visual interest to our web site designs and engage our readers. I know, Mango Blog already has a flickrWidget, but I didn't really like the slideshow and wanted to see a group of thumbnails instead. So I built my own plugin. Now you Mango Blog owners have an option for putting your flickr Pics onto your site.

Features

The flickrPics plugin has some great features not available in all plugins yet. This plugin is pod-enabled so you can set it's position within your sidebar in the admin. This is also the first plugin that supports Caching. Thanks to Adam Tuttle for writing the cache script that he will publish later this week on his site Fusion Grokker. Caching the feeds from these plugins will increase performance of your blog and will be less likely to return an error if those site go offline for any length of time.

This Cache feature is something I will also be adding to the twitter plugin later this week.

Configuration Settings

I tried to pack several useful features into flickrPics to give you flexibility to make it work in as many themes as possible. When you configure the flickrPics plugin you have a few options available.

Tags: allow you to perform a search through your photos for particular tags. This is a comma separated list and works the same as it would like the flicker search.

Photos to Display: A numerical value for the number of images you want to show at a time.

Photo Size: Square thumbnails, and medium thumbnails are the only two options at the moment. I am looking into other options for future updates.

Custom Header: Allows you to specify a custom H2 title.

Image Wrappers: There are two extra fields "before image" and "after image" that allow you to wrap your images in custom elements like <p> tags or a <br> tag.

Download the plugin

The flickrPics plugin is free to download so get it now, and please provide me your feedback for it's usefulness, and suggestions for improvements.

Twitter, the popular micro blogging social phenomenon is taking the blogosphere by storm. I felt Mango Blog needed to keep up with the times. I was also working on a new theme that required a twitter sidebar widget. This meant I had to force myself to learn about the plugin system for mango blog. I was about to throw in the towel, call it quits and cry my eyes out then all of a sudden it started to "click". Within the next hour or so I fixed my plugin and got it working as intended. Hooray!

Features

I tried to make it as flexible as possible. Adding a few extra hooks for future styling needs.  While I was at it. I added a custom javascript that automatically links @Usernames as well as hyperlinks in the tweet. Something the original twitter badge does not do.

Configuration Settings

I tried to make the plugin settings functional as well for future proofing the plugin. I added the ability to customize the H2 text that appears in the sidebar. Or you can choose not to show any heading at all by leaving the field blank.

Additionally, I added a location selector for the follow me hyperlink. There are three settings available: None for do not show a link. Below for displaying the traditional link below the posts, or Above if you want to link to a twitter logo or other graphic.

Lastly, I added the ability to specify the number of posts to show at a time.

Download Plugin

So here is it! My very first mango blog plugin! Since this is my first plugin, I would really appreciate your feedback, comments or suggestions.

Custom Tag Option

As a side note, I also have a custom tag version of this plugin. It's not as good as the plugin, but sometimes a theme might require something unique that a sidebar plugin cannot provide.

Thank You

Thanks to Laura for advising me on pod enabeling this plugin, and also for writing a portion of the installer script so that it's "Mango Certified"

Mango Blog uses the same default code for it's comment form as wordpress. Although I have seen worse offenders, the current form does pose a few accessibility chalenges that I would prefer to fix. So this evening I set out to rework the comment form and try to make it more accessible and customizable. This is an early prtotype of a new form that I hope would become the new standard for mango blogs comment forms. Let me explain the challenges that I have identified with the current format, and why I have chosen the form design that I did. If anyone has suggestions for improvement please let me know.

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