WordPress Plugin – FV Community News
Posted by Frank on September 30, 2008Many 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 Community News” Page – Allow registered users to view their submitted articles.
- Customizable templates
- Akismet Spam protection (API key required)
- Build-in RSS 2.0 Feed
- Settings Page
- Uninstallation – Not the right plugin for you? You can easily remove it completely.
How To Install & Use
In order to successfully use this plugin, you will need the following:
- PHP 5 or higher (PHP 7 recommended)
- WordPress 4.8 or higher
Installation Steps
- 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.
If you want the Community News to be shown on a WordPress page or post, you can use the build-in shortcodes for that. Put any of the following shortcodes in a page or post to show corresponding item:
Form to add news
[fvcn-post-form]
List of Posts
[fvcn-recent-posts]
Tag Cloud
[fvcn-tag-cloud]
Custom Templates
Every blog out there has different requests and needs. With version 2.0 and up, the plugin supports custom templates so it can meet all of those needs. Creating your own custom templates is simple, and more information on this can be found on the Custom Templates page, dedicated to this topic.
Bugs
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! You can do this on the bug reports forum.
Help Needed?
If you need any help, or have problems with this plugin, please create a post on the support forums.
Plugin Info
AUTHOR: Frank Verhoeven
AUTHOR URL: https://frankverhoeven.me/
CURRENT VERSION: 3.2.1
WORDPRESS VERSION: 4.8+
PHP VERSION: 7.0+
Change log
If you are interested in the changes this plugin has had, please check out the changelog on the official WordPress page.
Download
DOWNLOAD: FV Community News
Support
If this plugin is helpful to you, please consider supporting it! You can help it’s development by making a small donation, or promote it by putting a link to this page on your site. Appreciate it!
After update to 1.2.1 , when I tried to post news … after clicking on ‘Post’ there was ‘… loading’ message but no news were posted, the script hanged at loading…
Thanks
Yes I saw, I made a little mistake with the path to the images. A fix is on it’s way 🙂
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hello, nice plugin, just a note: I’m getting an error whrn logging in with a user profile:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /path/wp-content/plugins/fv-community-news/fvCommunityNews.php on line 1017
users are not able to edit / view their submissions
using WP 2.6.2
ciao!
Hi Neuville,
I have fixed the problem you mentioned and submitted version 1.2.1 to wp.org. After a minute or so it should be available for download.
Thanks for reporting that issue!
i’m new to this whole WP thing but doesn’t it make sense to create shorttags for insertion of the “add form” and “latest submissions” rather than having people mod a page.php file ?
that way people can create a page in WP, then put something like [FV PLUGIN] or something and they’re good to go?
pardon me if this is a stupid question…
Well, I actualy planned to create this for version 1.2, but pushed it up to the next version. Anyway thanks for the tip!
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Regards
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Thanks Frank, I know that gziped files wont work for visitors using Safari.
Here is the solution I implemented (.htaccess file):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#Check to see if browser can accept gzip files.
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
#make sure there’s no trailing .gz on the url
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$
#check to see if a .gz version of the file exists.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
#All conditions met so add .gz to URL filename (invisibly)
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [QSA,L]
Basically, if browser can’t accept gzip files, ‘regular’ files are served. All I needed is open source 7-Zip to gzip ‘regular’ files.
Nice solution 😉
This is wonderful! You have no idea how much this is going to help our community! I was wondering how I would go about making the URL field not required since some small organizations, like a church group lets say, might not have a website.
Thanks!
Hi Christopher,
If you want to do this now you have to modify the code, but I decided to make the URL field optional in the next release. Witch (I hope) will be released somewhere in the next two weeks.
Thank You! for optimizing, I also gziped files, perfect.
Looking forward for the new releases :), with the ‘edit title and description’ ability, …
As a side note a suggestion: not sure if that is hard to do, but in case it’s not you should probably make this plugin also work with jQuery and MooTools, so that users can pick the right solution in case they already use some of this scripts via other plugins … make sense?
Good it worked for you (and properly for everyone).
About the other lib’s, properly the best thing would be to create a piece of javascript witch doesn’t require a library at all. But because different browsers require different functions to work, I think we almost can’t work without these great libraries. I will think about it.
One other thing, I don’t now if you are aware of this, but the gziped files wont work for visitors using Safari. You could find more info and a solution 🙂 here.
i have put these script in Templates section
%submission_author%, %submission_author_email%, %submission_title%, %submission_url%, %submission_description%, %submission_date%
@Thomas
Will do that 🙂 .
Edit: Done, should be available on wordpress.org within a few minutes. Please let me know if it’s enough optimized.
@Aquil
You should also add the html. So if want the link to the post, you should do something like this:
chk my website i have put community section but prob is that when is submit templates setting, all the field are displaying individually, plz resolve my prob
http://www.freeziq.com/2008/09/27/diy-map-create-free-clickable-maps-in-flash.html
Can you get rid of the useless files witch are included now in some 1.11 version without any other changes.
Plugin is great but to heavy, even gzipped, there to many additional http requests and we know we all use many other plugins also.
I just can’t use this plugin like this, my page is twice heavy as it was before.
Thanks.
Forgive me, but what exact file should I look in?
No problem, just view the source of your web page, right mouse > view source and locate the community news 🙂
Wow what a perfect plugin, great job with this!! I just have one question I want to change the title color under the community news widget how can I go about doing this?
How can I display let’s say the last 100 news in a wordpress page ? From what I know PHP code isn’t recognized in a WordPress page …
@ crazyleaf
What you could do is make some modifications to your
page.phptemplate file. For example you could do something like this:681 is the id of the page where you want to display the stuff. (Could be found in the wp-admin)
Thanks Stefan 😉 .
But I decided to add some tags to this plugin which could be used in posts/pages to display this kinda things. So you could also wait for the next update.
@JayTee
Thank you!
Properly your best shot is to see your source code, and check witch class/id this title has. Modify this one and your done.
Great plugin I tried the nettuts.com tut on this but couldnt get it working but having similar probs here probably due to my bad CSS 😉
I have the links and form in the sidebar of http://styl.eti.me but the links aren’t clickable and for some reason the text is all out of line? ;(
Thank you, I appriciate. One of the best wp plugins ever, and I really mean that.
Thanks again.
@Tomas
Thank you! 🙂
@Styletime
Witch browser are you using? Because when I checked the page the links actually are clickable for me. The second thing I noticed is that the community news is displayed in a second sidebar (
#sidebar2), maybe this isn’t the way it should?Great plugin, but I’m not sure I like a new version. There are too much .js files and http requests, even gziped, my page loads are twice as long as before.
I need core functionality not sounds.js at my website. Thanks.
Well, that’s because of the scriptaculous library, but you are right and I was already started to create a solution for this. Maybe I should get rid of the libs and just created the whole javascript myself. However, at least I will get rid of the useless files witch are included now.
@ES
It also is already released 🙂 Please visit this post for more information.
@Adam
Well who knows, maybe I will do this in the future.
Thanks for your comments!
Wow! I’m looking that extension for joomla cms. Convert this plugin please 😉 Great work. This is popular.
Today is tomorrow. 😉
Is there a way to require users to be logged in before they can post?
This is implemented in version 1.1, wich will be released tomorrow 🙂
Yes your right about the bracket, thanks!
The option to edit submissions will come with version 1.2, because I already improved a lot of things for 1.1 and I will release that one tomorrow 🙂 .
Oh, and it’s great to hear you like the plugin! 🙂
Thanks again Frank. It works great now with the “echo”.
There is a missing bracket also in :
“if (function_exists(‘fvCommunityNewsForm’)”
I think it should be:
“if (function_exists(‘fvCommunityNewsForm’))”
And for the future update I think editing capabilitie will be great plus the suggested thumbnails @fres.
I think this will be one of the greatest wordpress in the future because it achieves a social concept as Facebook does.
Add: I checked the widget again and I know this is strange because the widget(which works fine) use the same function.
But when I tried to use it alone as you discribed above it didn`t work.
Thanks for support 🙂
Hey HimtoX
Your right, it doesn’t work because you need to add echo before the function. I forgot to type this down in the example (updated now).
Note that when you don’t have any submissions yet, the function also doesn’t display anything.
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks a lot Frank for your great plugin.
I tried to install it manually using the fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions Function as you mentioned, but it didn`t work at all.
Have you tried it manually?
(The widget works fine)
plugin looks interesting, would be awesome if user could post a photo (or multi photos), would make a useful tool for someone like me in real estate. Can that be implemented?
I think that’s a really good idea! And I defenitly will take a look at it. 🙂
Great blog. I like layout!!!!
@Computer Security: Thanks, and yes I know, I thought it might be a good idea to implement akismet, still working on that one 🙂
@David: Yes there is, see this page at Add Form below Install and further, this PHP code could be placed anywhere you want 😉
Hey Frank,
love the idea behind this plugin awesome bro.
But I have a question maybe someone can help me with is there a way to add the form to my sidebar without using the widget?
I would greatly appreciate it man thanks.
–David
A great plugin… it can give you lot of content for your website… There should be some improvement to combat the spam submissions
At WP 2.6.2 in moderation, there is community news description, email, IP and date field, I don’t see News URL, the most important field to choose to Allow or Deny news. Thanks.
Well actually there is, it stands next to %submission_title%. You can use the following tags: %submission_author%, %submission_author_email%, %submission_title%, %submission_url%, %submission_description% and %submission_date%. %submission_url% will change into the location of the article, so it doesn’t automatically add the anchor tag.
Edit: I’m sorry, I misunderstood your comment and you’re absolutely right. I have fixed this little issue and updated the download.
Thanks for pointing this out!
Awesome plugin, I am really looking at bringing this into my blog cause I have been trying to create a better since of community for awhile and I think this would really work. Thanks for writing it up =)
I’m happy you like it 🙂 .
is there a way to manually add some code where you want the widget to appear in your sidebar?
Yes there is. You could use the following functions: fvCommunityNewsForm to get the form, and fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions to get the submissions.