“My favorite posts” is a WordPress plugin which allows logged in users to add posts they like to a private favorite post list.

This post will teach you how to use the plugin.

Current Version: 1.2
Last Update: October 10th 2008

Download

First of all you need do download the zip file, unzip it and place the fav_me.php file at your server at /wp-content/plugins/.

Installation

Installation is rather easy: just activate the plugin, it will create the database table it needs to work on its own.

Using the Plugin

We leave the no-brainer part to learn something interesting now: how to implement the plugin in your theme.
Basically all you need are 2 functions:

1. mfp_the_link();
2. mfp_display();

mfp_the_link will display an “Add this post to your favorite post list” link wherever you call it. Best practice of course is to add the function anywhere INSIDE your WordPress loop. That will create the add link for each post.

You can pass up to two parameters when calling mfp_the_link().
These are: add_link and remove_link.
The syntax is euqal to many wordpress core functions:

mfp_the_link("add_link=add me please&remove_link=remove me please");

This will replace the default link names with the ones you provide. If you want you can add markup as well:

mfp_the_link("add_link=<span class='add_this'>add me please</span>");

mfp_display will display the list of favorite posts anywhere you like. No WordPress loop required here.
So you can put the list in your sidebar, footer, main content area etc.

Of course you can pass parameters here as well. Calling the function without parameters will create an unordered list: each list item will contain a link to the post and a “remove link”.
The default classes added are:

• ul class: mfp_favorites
• link class: mfp_link
• remove link class: mfp_remove_link

So you don’t like my classes? Or you want to display the items in <div> and <p> instead of <ul> and <li>?
Here are the parameters you may change:

• title : Default is no title
• display : Default is “list” -> you may change it to “div”
• remove_link : Text for remove link, Default is “remove”
• class : Class for ul/div , defaul is “mfp_favorites”
• link_class : Class for the post link, default is “mfp_link”
• remove_link_class : Class for remove link, default is “mfp_remove_link”
• order_by : Order of items, default is ID, you can change that to any field name of the wp_posts table: some examples would be “post_title”, “post_author”, “post_date”. Get the full list at the WordPress Codex.

Some examples:

// Add a h3 title
mfp_display("title=<h3>Favorite Posts</h3>")

// Display as Div with different class names
mfp_display("display=div&class=class_1&link_class=class_2");

// Order by post Title & different remove link text
mfp_display("order_by=post_title&remove_link=up up and away");

Another option is to pass the ID of a user to the function. This way it will display another users favorite post list. you can do that by apending the ID as a seperate parameter. The following example would retrieve the posts of user 13 from the database:

mfp_display("order_by=post_title",13);

One of the best options to use this function would be to show it on the authors page of a user. Just insert the ID of the user dynamically

Another option to display the posts is through the widget added in version 1.2.

Thats it. If you encounter any problems, please tell me via contact form or comments. I would also be glad to hear suggestions for improvements, be it in functionality, usability or code wise.

Have a nice day

Version History:

v.1.0: 03.06.2008
v.1.1: 04.06.2008 (major code change, increased flexibility)
v.1.1.1: 10.06.2008 (minor bug fix: broken <a/> tag & php notice)
v.1.2: 10.08.2008 (added widget support and possibility to display other peoples favorite posts)

Today I read an interesting article on NETTUTS which claims to unravel the Secrets of WordPress & Comments.php File. This is actually pretty true, the author did a good job at explaining the different functions, comment loops, and form elements.

The one thing I really missed was an explanation on how to separate comments from trackbacks. Discussing on a blog with tons of trackback posts between the ongoing discussion is really annoying.

Read more »

Last week I showed you how to create a menu which reveals itself only to logged in users, utilizing the WordPress function current_user_can(). Today we will take this one step further and create a Login form for your users, which can be placed in your sidebar, footer or anywhere else on your page.

Read more »

Here is a short tutorial on how to create an additional WordPress menu that only shows up if a user is logged in. I use this technique to create admin front end interface menus for the most used tasks: writing and editing posts and pages, editing the current post , a direct link to the “manage” Section of the WordPress admin Interface etc.

Read more »

I for myself really enjoy using WordPress as a Content Management System, since most of the time its really easy to adapt to my needs. I usually use the different categories on my sites to display the various sections of the sites. For example, kriesi.at uses the category “tutorials” to feed the resources page and the “portfolio” category to feed my online portfolio.

This is easily accomplished by using the query_posts() function of WordPress which i won’t discuss in detail since the documentations are pretty comprehensive.

The problem I recently encountered is that the WordPress generated rss feed must be modified as well, otherwise it will display every post in each category. A user subscribing to my blog feed doesn’t want to be bothered with portfolio entrys, so I searched for a way to exclude categories from the main feed. There are basically two solutions I could find:

1. Exclude the Categories via URL
2. Exclude the Categories through using a small function

Both ways are really simple:

If you want to exclude a category you first have to know the ID of course. In WordPress versions prior to 2.5 you could just get it in your admin panels “manage” -> “categories” section. Post 2.5 versions do not display the category ID anymore but you can get it by hovering over the category name and extracting it from the link URL. Its the cat_ID attribute.

Say you want to exclude category 20 you just append ?cat=-20 to your feed url.

Example:

• normal feed: http://www.kriesi.at/feed
• modified feed: http://www.kriesi.at/feed?cat=-20
• want to exclude more categories: http://www.kriesi.at/feed?cat=-20&cat=-21&cat=-22

Well these URLs are not what i would consider beautiful so you might use a service like feedburner to create a nice looking feed out of it. But beware, feedburner expects a slightly different syntax; insted of using ampersands you have to use commas:

So if you want to exclude a WordPress category from the Feedburner feed do it this way:

http://www.kriesi.at/feed?cat=-20,-21,-22

If you dont’t like this way of excluding you can use a small function instead. Just add the following code anywhere to your templates functions.php:

function my_cat_exclude($query) {
    if ($query->is_feed) {
        $query->set('cat','-20,-21,-22');
    }
    return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','my_cat_exclude');

This function will strip the categories you define out of your RSS Feed without the need of adjusting your url.
A clean and simple way but not as flexible as using URLs if you want to provide more than one feed.

Hope this helps you if you ever need to modify your feed.