More Features to Wordpress Steemit Plugin - GK Steemit Info 0.7.0

Introduction

It's been almost two months since our last update to our GK Steemit Info wordpress plugin, and that is essentially due to my personal lack of time to devote into the project.
Yet as of last week, and particularly after our promo-steem and steem-ambassador meetup, I vowed to myself to give another round this week, which I gladly did, especially that the plugin would definitely come in handy in accomplishing many of the needed functionalities on the promo-steem.com website.
In fact, the core of today's update is targeted at simply doing that (more on this below) while keeping in mind that the essential purpose of GK Steemit Info is on being a tool to easily plug various steemit related information into your existing wordpress solution, while playing the role of ultimately bringing more visibility to steem/steemit.

Quick Recap

GK Steemit Info was initiated few months back to simply provide a tool to easily and dynamically allow wordpress website owners, or steemians interested in hosting their own wordpress solutions, to utilize wordpress' widget concept to dynamically drag/drop a set of useful information from the steem blockchain, or accomplish a similar target alternatively via shortcodes while embedding those scripts into pages or posts.
Up until version 0.6.0, the plugin provided access to a multitude of widgets, but on top of that allowed the dynamic creation of steemit users via delegation, as further detailed below:

• Create steemit user accounts via delegation
• Display general steem(it) info, such as steem user count, STEEM/USD, SBD/USD, SBD & STEEM current supply.
• Display user(s) account info, such as account name, image, location, SP, delegated SP, STEEM, account value,...
• Listing of user posts with filtering options
• Listing of trending posts with filtering options
• Listing of user voted posts

New Development Work

General Overview

As highlighted in the introduction, the essence of this update was to bring to wordpress website such as promo-steem.com the capability to display posts under a specific tag on their own site, while easily highlighting if specific users have upvoted those posts, but also enabling a view mode that only displays posts which have actually been upvoted by particular account.
This is essential to the main website audience if they are looking at particular posts from a specific tag, but also to determine, on-sight, if one or more members of a "configurable" team, such as the steem-ambassador team, have upvoted those posts.

New Widget/Shortcode Details

Essentially we created a new widget, entitled Steemit Tag Filtered Voted Posts Widget, which would allow the insertion of aforementioned posts into the widget section, and allows a multitude of configurable options, as follows:

• Title: the title of the widget to be displayed on the front end
• Max Post Count: indicating how many posts to be fetched
• Filter by Tag: one of the essential uses of this widget as to filter content by specific tag
• Voters: which constitutes the list of users [AKA team] who we are looking for indicators as to if one of the members upvoted a post
• Only Include Voted Posts: which allows operating in a mode where only posts upvoted b the team will display
• Allow Front End Filtering : this is work in progress and is not operational as of now, but gives a hint into some of the future work we have in mind :)
  
  
  
  The result of utilizing this widget on your wordpress site would yield something similar to the below
  
  

In addition to the widget, you can alternatively utilize a shortcode within your post/page/code to have a similar yet more detailed display of those posts as well
[steemit_tag_voted_posts filtertag=TAG limit=LIMIT voters=VOTER1,VOTER2 restrictvotedonly=0 excludevoters=VOTER1,VOTER2 showfilters=0]
The exludevoters param is another hint at upcoming work we have in mind :)

The result of using the shortcode would provide a further detailed view of the posts, as depicted below including image, a short description, along with the post's tags

Layout Changes and Stylesheet refactoring

While my design skills are very limited, I did create a basic layout for the posts to be displayed here as you have noticed above. This styling change affects all existing widget display, as well as the shortcode visuals as seen above. I normally go for very minimalist designs not to conflict with other themes, while giving the user the flexibility to adjust his own CSS requirements.
Along with the layout changes, came the stylesheet refactoring, whereby due to the increase in styling requirements, I moved all the CSS code to a separate style.css file available as part of the plugin installation.

Minor Bug Fix

The release also included a minor bug fix for some badly named params affecting proper shortcode usability on the sites.

Relevant Commit

The most recent commit link related to this 0.7.0 update can be found here.

Downloading the plugin

The plugin is available for download via the official GitHub repository.

Future Work

While we hinted at several items above in relevance to future work, including the "Allow Front End Filtering", and "Exclude Voter Posts" relating to posts upvoted specific users or bots to be excluded, yet we do also have further plans such as:

• Including an AJAX experience to dynamically view the full display of the post
• Allowing direct voting capability from within the screen hence allowing an easier curation experience
• Integrating steemconnect to the plugin
• Hosting your own manual curation trail concept via the plugin
• A daily digest of user posts via email
  and much more...

Feel free to check out the new version and come back with any comments, feedback, and/or suggestions :)

Thank you!

@mcfarhat

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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