Bryce's Blog

It looks like things have been pretty productive. Recently, I made two plugins for Habari. Today, I will be talking about one of them, which is called G+ Author.

I have noticed that many people are linking their stuff to a Google+ account, which does seem neat, but I was not really certain that I would want to do so as well.

That all changed, when Les Henderson, of Habarians suggested that I should consider it, mainly because I told him about something I noticed. He gave me links, which told me how to go about it, but making the kinds of edits needed can become a pain, no matter whether one wants to do so through Habari or SQL statements.

Because it would be easier to put that kind of stuff in a theme or plugin, I thought that I would create this plugin, especially since other people may want to add the necessary stuff without entering the code needed in PHP files and cover multiple pages easily.

The G+ Author plugin does just exactly that by inserting a link element into the header of a Habari site.

Plugin instructions

Instead of the usual demonstration, since one can see it for him or herself, as documented by Google, I will go over how to use this plugin, which is a bit different from the instructions provided by Google and Yoast.

1. Download plugin to plugins directory
2. Activate plugin
3. Configure plugin (required)

Notes

Unlike the post on Yoast and Google’s documentation, configuration does not mean copying and pasting the web address to one’s own Google+ profile, which would be simpler, but then one would have to edit PHP files, which some might not be comfortable doing.

To make things simpler, especially since there is a pattern to the web addresses to Google+ profiles, the plugin will automatically create the address, which is based on the address found in the Yoast link. This happens once the user configures the plugin, which is why it is a required step.

All one needs to enter is the id for the Google+ profile, which can be found via the details in the plugin’s README file, and a link from the site to the Google+ profile will be established, but the other stuff, such adding a contributor link, will still need to be done.

While this seems to make things simple, there are some issues that I do know about. However, the only one that comes to mind is that only one author is given credit for the creation of content. When I made this plugin, I made it to suit my needs because that was the simplest to implement. In order for it work with multiple authors, a lot more time would be needed to organize the data correctly (e.g. using linking tables), which might not be compatible with all SQL databases for various reasons, require conditional statements in theme, and/or only function with one theme, due to issues with placement of post author or, which would be less troublesome than placement but still a pain, class and id attributes that are not the same across all themes. I would be glad if somebody could do something that about that issue that does not require editing PHP files though.

What do you guys think about the G+ Author plugin? Do you think that this is useful or should it have support for multiple users? Feel free to comment.