Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I don’t have any great plugin ideas recently, so I thought I might post a drop-box here on the blog for you to leave plugin requests. If there’s a plugin or feature you wish you had in Wordpress that you don’t have, leave a comment! Be specific in the requirements you have.

I’ll release any plugins I implement from the suggestions here as GPL plugins for the entire Wordpress community to enjoy.

I liked the idea of a Lifestream view for my blog, so I took at Chris J. Davis’ Lifestream plugin. Unfortunately, it was limited to a small subset of RSS feeds, which I did not find useful. So, I rewrote the “engine” behind the lifestream to produce my own lifestream plugin. Enjoy!

Version 0.1 BETA! Use at own risk! Not production code!

Features: What it does

You might wonder what this lifestream implementation offers over others. The primary differences are:

• Pluggable, auto-detected data-source modules
• Disk-based caching interface
• RSS, Database, Facebook, Flickr API integration

WP-Lifestream ships with the following modules: Wordpress, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, and Wordie. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Download & Installation

This is the hard part. Download lifestream.zip. You’ll need to do the following, then:

• Put wp-cron.php in your plugins folder and activate it
• Put the entire data folder into your theme folder
• Put stream.php and life.php into your theme folder
• Customize stream.php to fit your template
• Put images/lifestream somewhere sensible and change the references to it
• If you want to use the Facebook or Flickr widgets, edit data/lib/common.php with your credentials
• Make things writable that need to be. Things like data/lib/flickrcache, data/lib/cookie.txt, and data/cache are good places to start

That’s a pain. I’ll make it easier in the future, I promise.

Adding a new source

Adding a new source is the easiest and most fun part of the new infrastructure. There are just three things to do:

1) Write a class which implements a method called Refresh(){…} which will be called whenever the caches need to be refreshed and a method called Items(){…} which should return an array[time] = array(title, link), and has a member name defining its unique display name.

2) Create a file for your new source, and put it in the data directory. It should call $lifestream->AddService with your class, like $this->AddService(new YourDataSource());

3) Create a nice icon and add it to the images/lifestream folder and in stream.php. In the future module classes will be fully encapsulated with their own styles and icons.

If you do create a new class of source, please email me and I’ll include it immediately!

Changelog

.01 – initial version

Disclaimer: Don’t use this plugin if you don’t use a caching product. It won’t work well for you, because you don’t care about performance on this fine grain. Using this plugin will hurt your page load time, because it does a large mess of string processing to spit optimized css and javascript into the page itself–processing usually defered to the browser.

WP-CSS-JS-Inline does exactly what the graphic says–takes all the javascript and css styles and merges them into your page, producing a single document. External references in the CSS–say a url(…) element–are resolved automatically to absolute paths if they are not already. It also compresses and tidies CSS.

If you’d like to try it out, just download wp-css-js-inline.zip, unzip, and place into your wp-plugins directory. You can then activate it on your admin page, and watch it work its magic on your posts and home page.

This is an untested beta release and may render your wordpress install completely unusable. Proceed with caution, and leave comments on this post if you find any bugs!