[Update] – This plugin is stale
Sorry, but this hasn’t been maintained in a while and may be unsuitable for use in current versions of WordPress, since I don’t use it anymore and therefore haven’t tried it.
It’s also unlikely that I’ll be updating it in the future, but the code is out there and I heartily encourage anyone who wants to take it over / fork it to do so.
[2009/09/12] Thinking about updating this again… please leave a comment here to let me know if you’d be interested in using it.
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FreePress Tagboard 2.2 is a tagboard plugin for WordPress blogs.
It is based on the excellent AJAX Shoutbox tagboard originally published by Andrew Sutherland, with a few modifications to make it work the way I wanted it to.
Key features include:
- All the AJAX-y goodness of the original, so that all the participants can see the new messages in the conversation as it progresses, without refreshing the page.
- Redesigned backend that uses the WordPress comment system to save and manage the messages submitted. This has the advantage of any spam prevention plugins (like Akismet and/or Spam Karma 2) to help keep the unwanted entries at bay.
- Repackaged as a “widget“, which allows for easy configuration and placement in the sidebar.
Download FreePress Tagboard Widget
Temporarily unavailable pending a rewrite. Sorry.
Installation:
- Extract all files in the archive into your plugins directory. The archive should contain a folder called “freepress”, which should be placed directly under the plugins directory, and all the files distributed with this plugin should be in the “freepress” folder. For example:
/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/freepress/tagboardWidget.php - If you are using the widgets plugin, the tagboard will automatically appear as an available widget for your sidebar.
- If you prefer to manually add the tagboard to your theme, you can insert the following code wherever you’d like the tagboard to show up:
*** IMPORTANT INSTALLATION INSTRUCTION: ***
If you are using the out-of-the-box options for WordPress (as of recent versions), there is a setting under Options \ Discussion with the label “Comment author must have a previously approved comment“, which is checked by default. If this remains checked, then it will apply to the tagboard as well (since it uses the WP comment system). This will mean that tags from previously unrecognized users will be held in moderation, and it will appear to those users that the tagboard is not working. If you don’t want this, I’d suggest unchecking the box for now. I’m debating whether to include that as a separate option in the tagboard config page and have the tagboard ignore that part of the WP comment filter, based on user feedback.
Bug fix notice:
Prior to version 2.1 of this plugin, there was an issue which resulted in non-registered users not being able to submit a tag using the tagboard. This was caused by an oversight on my part in remembering that the WordPress discussion option labeled “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail” is checked by default, and there is no e-mail address field provided by the tagboard. For now, it will just include a dummy address (for non-registered users) to avoid that issue. In the future, it will either add an e-mail field for non-registered users or avoid that restriction for the tagboard, depending on user feedback.
*Note: This version of the plugin has been tested in WordPress 2.x as well as recent versions of WordPress MU. Please let me know by commenting here if you run into any issues.
This program is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
We’ve just installed this plugin on a wmpu installation, but nothing is happening. The sidebar widget shows up, and when we drop it in, we get the welcome message, but nothing else. Using Firebug, I can see that the xmlhttp requests are firing off to the right location, but 0 is coming back. When I send of a POST with a new comment, nothing comes back. If I manually add a comment to the private holder post, it shows up fine in the chat box.
Any ideas? We are using SK2.
Any chance you have the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment“ option set?
very good work. However, playing around with a few needed modifications (like, display posts with ascending, rather than descending order -would be nice and easy to have as option- and after messing up the colors) I finally broke something. Tried to do an overwrite, but settings remained the same.
Any advice on doing a clean uninstall – reinstall? Thank you.
Hi there first of all thank you for working on this plugin I really love it!!!
Now my Problem: I just installed a new Blog with WP 2.5, installed your Plugin Widget, activated it, unchecked all “Before a comment appears:” options, but I am not able to write any messages. After fiddeling around a bit I accidentally deleted your first “congrats” post, but never the less after typing a new messages nothing appears .
Only your “You need at least one entry in your shoutbox! Just type in a message now and reload, then you should be fine.” Well it isn’t fine.
I deleted the plugin installed it again but still no change.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your support!
Cheers!
After going into the options table in my database and deleting the option with the name “widget_fp_tagboard_postid� and then reinstalling the Plugin fixed my problem!
Thanks for this wonderful Plugin!
Hello, is it possible to make alternating background for each tagboard entry? I tried using the code from the comments.php file, but failed as I know no PHP. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
Hi! I installed the plugin and activated it. A page came out saying that it is my Tagboard Placeholder or something. But as a blog entry. I don’t get it.
I can’t find it anywhere on my sidebar as well.:( Please help!
Hi, I have installed your plugin and have it working, but I am running into one fairly big problem. Any post to it winds up getting caught by askimet. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Is there anything you could do to help me on this?
Probably not until a new version comes out. The “feature” I added for automatically providing an e-mail address to the tag comments was a bad idea in hindsight. Originally it was to work around the people who require e-mail addresses for commenting, but the hardcoded one that gets added is added to the spam tags as well and eventually flagged in Akismet. I’ll need to post a new version to correct this, and just add an e-mail field for people who require e-mail addresses for posting comments.
Cool beans…any idea when that new version will be available?
hello,had a question,how can I resize the chatbox width? thankyou.
Sorry for the delayed reply. You can definitely adjust any aspects of the display using CSS rules.
When I update these for WP 2.1 and rerelease (any day now…) I will aim to not have any extra CSS included / required by default, so that it looks OK without modification and then is more easily customized if that’s what you want to do.
I’m running WPMU, and modified your plugin a little to make it work in mu-plugins, and am looking forward to the new version. However, this plugin is broken by the More Smilies plugin with messages similar to here. Is there anything that can be done to resolve this? Thanks.
Cannot download the zip file. Download link broken?
Opens an HTML page. Right Click -> download also download the same page as a file with .zip extension.
Please write back!
hello still using your plugin and have some questions:
- did you know that because your plugin is using the commentform, if I have the tagboard and a post in single view on the same “page” it does not validate because the commentform uses IDs to identify its parts, so that I have several elements with the same ID on the same page, so it does not validate.
Furthermore, severall spam plugins like akismet or sk2 do also judge comments based on the email adress so comments by someone with this dummy email address will not be punished that hard, because there area a lot of comments in the DB from this email and this makes these spam plugins believe its the same commenter and give it some extra points…
Shrikant: Yes, I’ve taken this one down for the time being, as it needs rewriting.
ovizii: Yes, the reasons you mentioned are some of the ones that inspired me to do a rewrite on this plugin, and not offer it again until they are fixed.
ok, nice to see authors taking care of such unimportant issues as validation
I just spent 2 hours trying to validate some blogs I maintain and most of the work I was doing was changing plugins output, not actually the template
I’ll keep checking your site for updates.
can’t wait till the new version comes out. I’m not sure long I can tolerate using cbox …
I was wondering when you were going to complete the re-write and if it is not soonish then if you don’t mind posting the code again and open sourcing it license wise I would like to use it and make contributions to it.
Thanks,
Heidi
can someone please email this widget to me since he took the download link down
thx
LazyGregg@yahoo.com
This plug-in seems to be exactly what I’m looking for for my WPMU install!
Is there a link to the old version anywhere that I can try on my test installation whilst waiting for the new release?
By the way, does anyone know why the original shoutbox Wordpress plugin won’t work with WordpressMu? (http://blog.jalenack.com/ajax/)
If it requires small code changes to get it working then I’m happy to do this, just need a steer in the right direction
Looks like by popular demand I’ll need to dig this up again and post the link out there, since I probably won’t get around to updating it any time soon.
To answer your question, the original stored the tagboard entries in a separate unique table, so it wouldn’t work in MU since each blog in MU gets its own set of tables.
Mine was altered to store (and process, including spam filtering) the tags as comments to a private post, so they were stored in the individual blog’s comments table(s) in an MU install.
Hope to see the re-release of this plugin again.
I’ve tried to search all possible plugins, looks like only this is the best for WPMU.
Hi! Any idea if and when this plugin be available again?
And thanks for all your plugins, they are really really appreciated!
I’m also wondering the same thing – this sounds like an awesome plugin. I’d love to give it a whirl. =)
Dropping my name on the list of people that are looking forward to the next release
It sounds like exactly what I need for a MU powered site I’m working on…
hello,
I need some help. I have been using this plugin for quite a while, but now I wanted to give people access to the “archives” aka make a page called shoutbox archive that people can access and read all older comments. any idea how to do this?
if possible, the comments should be viewed in reverse order from newest to oldest.
I mean I can always just point a link to the post but the sort order is still not ok. can I assign a tempalte to a post or how can I format this?
Yes, the best thing to do would probably be to change the post to a page, which you can then apply a different template to.
would your plugin continue working if I change the post to a page? I mean I would do it using phpmysqladmin, so the post_id and other stuff would remain the same…
Yeah, it shouldn’t be a problem, although I haven’t tested it.
When will this be available for download?