Profile Badge Plugin

H, thanks for all the comments, I will try to answer as many as I can.

Firstly, it is not a bug that the plugin shows up in the edit details section, I design this on purpose. The plugin shows the code for a specific user to create a badge - I did not think that this is something that people would want on their public profiles, I certainly didn't want it on my site's profiles, so it shows under the edit details section. Whilst not ideal - as the plugin doesn't edit any details, I couldn't think of another way f hiding the plugin from other users than the profile owner whilst still giving the owner acess to the generated code. To access the plugin you can use this link: www.YOURSITE.COM/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&Itemid=39&task=userDetails&tab=getbadgetab
And that will link directly to the plugin.On the site I designed this plugin for I placed the link in the User Menu Under "Your Profile badge". hope that clears things up.

Thanks for the heads up on the user profile link - didn't catch that one. I will post a how to on how to change where the link directs to in a short while (have to eat first, just got back from uni) it is a simple process so if you want the badge to link to your homepage, or registration page it is not difficult to do

I'm not eactly sure what you mean by the rss feed - do you want the badge to instead show articles? :dry: I think there are some rss modules that might already do that.

Glad you were able to change the formatting, I tried to make it as easy as possible to change, with all of the formating contained ona few lines.

I had been worried that the number or characters generated by the plugin would be very large but since I initially designed it to create code that could be placed on myspace profiles I didn't really consider it. But being able to place the code on forum sigs would be a great idea, one of the problems is that the plugin uses tables - At some point I want to change it so that it produces the badge in a similar div layout, which should cut down on the size. The second problem is the size of the urls it produces. It would be better if it used shorter urls, but by default the urls for joomla sites are horribly long, taking up most of the character allowance in themselves eg:
YourSite.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=166 is a very long url for a link to the profile. Perhpas it could be made so that the plugin makes use of the url rewrite function - but my knowledge on that is very limited - I would definately need some help with that.

The plugin is only a first release, so I will try to improve the plugin further, if anyone else has any further comments or criticisms, please let me know, and I will try to upload an updated version within the hour

Thanks, Switch

Post edited by: Switch, at: 2007/03/02 18:50

One sandwich later and the updated version is now available in the Freebies section of SwitchTemplate.com - though whilst updating 27 people downloaded the prior release, so... Hopefully they will make their way to this thread and see the changes

So the changes are:
1.1 - Minor changes to formating made by mercutio
Link now directs to user profile as opposed to default profile thanks to mercutio
Inclusion of moslivesite means no code changes required thanks to DavidF

I have decided to keep the plugin in the edit user details tab for now as I feel that it should not be a public thing, if you wish to change this to load in the normal profile do the following:
In the badge.php file find

"function getEditTab($tab,$user,$ui) { "on line 26 and change it to:
"function getDisplayTab($tab,$user,$ui) {" (removing the " ")
This will cause the plugin to display in the user's profile. To create a link to the plugin you can use this link: www.YOURSITE.COM/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&Itemid=39&task=userDetails&tab=getbadgetab

That will link directly to the plugin. On the site I designed this plugin for I placed the link in the User Menu Under "Your Profile badge".

I mentioned that it was easy to change the location of the incoming link, here's how:

To cause the badge to link to your home page or anyother link find the replace all instances of
<a href=\"".PATH."/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=".$user->id."\">
with the link that you want, be it your homepage or a link to your registration page. By removing everything after ".PATH." the link points to your homepage. Thanks to DavidF for pointing out that the plugin should use mosLiveSite and providing the code to do so.


So, the updated plugin is uploaded, go and check it out and let me know any bugs that might come up when using it

Rockin' Switch - looks good. Think I'm gonna keep my badges public - works better for the business model of my site (I want third parties to be able to use the badge to further promote our artists' work), but I dig that user menu solution as well.

Wanted to clarify suggestions articles & RSS feed. Here's my ideal view of the badge:

1) User pic
2) Titles of 2-3 most recent articles published by that author (ideally dynamic, so would update as new work was published)
3) RSS icon that links to a feed of the user's published work.

Of course, this might need some integration with the Joomla Content Author plugin, and possibly the syndicate module.

Re: limited space per DavidF - We could strip out some of the links (ie - is it necessary to have a "Visit Member" when the pic already hyperlinks?). Another possibility might be to have it point back to a javascript link that would generate the information and pass it back to the web page with the code - think I've seen this in action around the web someplace, but dunno how to do it myself.

-M

Post edited by: mercutio, at: 2007/03/02 20:16

Wow, almost 500 downloads, I didnt think it would be that popular Sorry about the delayed replys, I have just been set this terms coursework so I have a lot on my plate at the moment. Thanks for the encouraging posts here, it really makes me want to continue work on the plugin

Those are some very interesting ideas about placing the latest article titles on the badge, it would be something I would like to to look in it when I got some time spare, though, because none of my sites allow users to submit work I can't dedicate much time to it, though if someone wants to lend a hand I would be more than willing to have a go.

I had a quick look at your site and like the way you have implemented the badge, I like the way that you allow other users to advertise the works of fellow members, the poets themselves could even perhaps place the badge at the end of a piece of work submited on other sites as a kind of signature.

Regarding the large amount of code produced: the badge is first and foremost an adertivsing tool, I want users to be ablee to place their badge on other sites they frequent. Having looked into this I found that many forums do indeed impose a limit on how many characters you are allowed to insert, some do not even allow html.

With this in mind I was thinking of creating a modified plugin called the Cb Profile forum Badge Plugin, a striped down version of the badge that generates a BB code snippet. It would look something like this:

[code:1]
Visit my mosLiveSitename Profile
[img] My Profile Image [/img]
[/code:1]

Because tere is far less information, no divs, no styling etc there should be far fewer characters, hopefully few enough to be allowed on most forums. My question is, would people like to see this as part of the original plugin, display as another option below, or as a new plugin?

The only other option I can think of is using javascript to create a image. Ihave seen it done with text - specifically email addresses - the script creates an image of the email address so that spam bots can't harvest it, but this is really out of my expertese, if anyone has any idea regarding this please let me know.

Hey guys... I'm just having one problem. When I've tested the badge out & placed the code into MySpace, the thumbnail doesn't show up. All I'm getting is ".." Does anyone know what this is & how I could fix that?

hi,

i installed the newest version of the badge plugin,
and thats cause problems when i want to acces user details via the user management.

i get this error message:

Notice: Undefined index: 505 in /home/ldapcustomers/4969/www/htdocs/administrator/components/com_comprofiler/plugin.class.php on line 261

Notice: Use of undefined constant PATH - assumed 'PATH' in /home/ldapcustomers/4969/www/htdocs/components/com_comprofiler/plugin/user/plug_profilebadge/badge.php on line 16

Notice: Undefined variable: mosConfig_lang in /home/ldapcustomers/4969/www/htdocs/components/com_comprofiler/plugin/user/plug_profilebadge/badge.php on line 52

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: sefreltoabs() in /home/ldapcustomers/4969/www/htdocs/components/com_comprofiler/plugin/user/plug_profilebadge/badge.php on line 58

can you tell me how to fix that ?

regards
Christian