WordPress Plugin: Amusements

Screenshot
Download Amusements 1.2 Now!

Introduction

Welcome to the Amusements plugin documentation page. Amusements is a simple plugin based on and improved over Joey Brooks’s Addictions. This plugin basically displays up to five current favourates in books, music, movie, games, (in fact anything) anywhere in your wordpress blog. The screenshot above shows a sidebar implimentation displaying a book, an audio book, and a DVD set. Each entry can have an image and a link (for example, to Amazon where the amusement is available).

The current version of Amusements is version 1.2 (see version history below). Download is available in zip format. Please leave a comment in the original post for bug report and additional support.

Amusements is under GPL and is available for free. You can download, use, modify, or keep in the back of your plugins directory in total disregard for eternity.

Features

  • Its own Options panel under “Options,” to ease setup and changing of settings
  • Standardized entries for all types of amusements, including:
    • heading
    • title
    • subtitle
    • image
    • image styles and size
    • link
    • short description
  • Ability to fetch images anywhere from your server or from the net
  • Customizable CSS classes for the images, description, titles, as well as the entire Amusements table!
  • Up to five amusement entries.
  • Version 1.2 now allows users to specify arbitrary order in which the amusements are displayed.

Installation

  1. Get the plugin
  2. Drop it in your plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins)
  3. In your Wordpress admin panel, click Plugins, and click ‘activate’ for Amusements.
  4. To use Amusements, just add anywhere (e.g. in sidebar.php) the following line:
    <?php get_amusements(); ?>

    You can also conditionally execute this line using:

    <?php if (function_exists('get_amusements')) { ?>
    ...the above line plus any additional HTML code...
<?php } ?>
  5. Fill out the relevant information in the Amusements Option Panel (accessed by going to the Wordpress Admin Panel, Clicking Options, then Clicking Amusements).

CSS and Image Fun

As stated in the features section, most of the plugin is covered in classes so you can style them with CSS. Those classes are as follows:

  • For the entire Amusements table: use .amusementtable
  • For headings: .amusementheading
  • For the titles: .amusement
  • For images: .amusementimg
  • For short descriptions: .amusementdesc

For example, you can use the following CSS code in styles.css to set the styles for table borders, link colors for the titles, and the heading text (the result is as appeared in the screenshot above):

table.amusementtable { border: 0; }
table.amusementtable td { border: 1px dotted #AAA; }
.amusement a { color: #909D73;	text-decoration: none; }
.amusement a:visited { color: #999999; text-decoration:none; }
.amusement a:hover { color: #990000; text-decoration:underline; }
.amusementheading { font-size: 1.1em; font-weight: bold; }

Amusements also has support for images. If you would like to include images to be placed with your amusement entry, then upload the images you would like to be displayed anywhere on your server, and enter it’s path in the image entry. You can also hotlink from people who don’t mind (e.g. from yourself, perhaps from your other sites, or from big companies like Amazon and Audible) by entering an URL.

Version History

  • Version 1.2
    • Now allows users to specify arbitrary order in which the amusements are displayed.
  • Version 1.1
    • Use CSS-stylable table instead of list to separate amusement entires.
    • Fixed backslash problems for single-quotes. Cannot use double-quotes in the entires.
  • Version 1.0
    • First release

Bugs and Additional Support

Please leave a comment in the original post for bug report and additional support.