Time for a new release! The previous release was 1.0.3, in case you were wondering. Anyways, new features:
- Long overdue: the game history can now be browsed. There are new navigation buttons, and the gamelog can be clicked on directly to display the board as of that move. Check it out on the examples page.
- There is now theme support. The intention is that new themes can be written in much the same manner as WordPress themes, and can be installed in the same manner as well: they’re subdirectories which only require a style sheet ChessByBlog.css, and are installed under the chess-by-blog/themes folder.
- In conjunction with theme support, there is now a new management panel added for the plugin, which allows you to switch themes easily and control board display options.
- The default themes now use image packing and CSS sprites, which should reduce board load time.
- Other user interface tweaks!
As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. For this release, however, I’ve switched hosting of the source to the WordPress.org plugin repository. You can download the release: chess-by-blog.1.1.0.zip directly from there, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.
Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!
August 11th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Hi! We really like the idea of playing chess on our blog, but when we press the quicktag button, the popup does not show the CBB form, but instead displays the (pretty much under construction) homepage for our main domain(http://wetzelweb.org)!
This is really strange.
Any ideas?
August 11th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Hm, I don’t have any ideas yet. That popup does call a separate script (wp-content/plugins/chess-by-blog/dialog.php) and so one thing to try is to see if you can load that page directly in your browser. You’ll have to modify that address relative to your WordPress installation, of course. If you can’t load that page and it’s kicking you back to your main domain, that indicates something weird maybe in your web server installation. If not it might be something wrong with the plugin.
I’m actually at a conference this week so I won’t be able to look into it further but if you still have trouble I’ll do some investigation on Saturday.
August 12th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I had the same issue as JawBoy, but found that by moving the dialog.php from the sub-folder called chess-by-blog up one level into the regular chess-by-blog folder, I could get the dialog box to come up.
Haven’t played with it much, yet but it looks great so far… Thanks!
August 12th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Aha! The file location that levork gave was
but John points out that the file isn’t actually there. Instead, its in
When I pointed the browser at the first address, it displayed http://wetzelweb.org. After I moved the dialog.php up a folder, it displayed the form as expected (after requiring me to log in to my blog).
So now I could insert code into my post
, but the chess board did not display in the post-preview 
. There was another PHP file in the second chess-by-blog folder, named “postmove.php,” so I moved that up a level. No dice (er, that is, no board). Moved all the other files (except the folder called “themes”) up a level, and got some stuff, including the numbers and letters that go around the board, but still no chess board. Moved the themes folder and there it is!
The board works
but it won’t rewind all the way to the beginning, and the post keeps the moves in the game history, rather than resetting when I refresh the page. 
(I can’t rewind all the way to the beginning on the Levork example page either, but it does start over on refresh.)
Some other notes:
The “Event” title from the form is not displayed.
The slashes between the players name and the color are displayed even when there is no player given.
The closed game displays the real WordPress username (last name only) rather than the display name. Yikes! We use screen names only on our blog, out of privacy & safety concerns for our friends (though our own names are not really well hidden if you look around the site). I think I can see how to fix this in the post code, but it would be good to have the display names in the “dialog.php” player field dropdown menus.
You can see the CBB post at http://wetzelweb.org/coolstuff3/?p=128.
Hope this helps, and thanks for the plugin!
August 12th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
I think there might be some confusion about the directory structure. This might be new in 1.1.0, especially since I moved over to wordpress.org and its automated zip archive creation mechanism (in previous releases, the top folder was called “ChessByBlog-1.0.3″, not “chess-by-blog”. The intention is that the contents of the top level chess-by-blog folder – which is the “chess-by-blog.php” and the chess-by-blog _subfolder_ – are both moved to sit directly in the wp-content/plugins folder. So you should see, in your installation:
+wp-content +-plugins +-chess-by-blog.php +-chess-by-blog +-dialog.php +-postmove.php +-XXX.js +-themes +-wikipedia-32 +-ChessbyBlog.cssI’ll try to make this more clear/robust in future releases.
Regarding your other problems, Jawboy:
- what browser/platform are you using when you can’t rewind the board?
- I’ll see where the Event label can be added that makes sense.
- The slash problem can be fixed.
- In previous releases, you were required to type in the First Name, the Last Name, and the Wordpress username separately. I had received a suggestion that this was redundant entry and that I just use the username to derive the rest. As a compromise, I can add the first name/last name fields back in, have them automatically filled in when you select the username, and allow you to override the last name fields for anonymity. Does that sound reasonable?
August 13th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Thanks for clarifying the directories, levork! So this plugin is a little different from the ones that are contained in a single folder? (The only other loose PHP file in my plugins folder at the moment is “hello.php” that came with WordPress. Every other plugin is contained in its own folder.) Your diagram has the chess-by-blog.php file in the /Plugins folder alongside the /Plugins/chess-by-blog folder, but when I moved the chess-by-blog.php file up a level to the /Plugins folder, it stopped working. So I’ve tucked it back in the folder with “dialog.php” and “post.php.”
I’m on Windows XP, using Firefox 3, but the rewind problem is in Safari 3.1 and IE 6-8 as well. (IE6 kills the navigation entirely.) The open game on your examples page does get back to “move zero” upon refresh in FF3 and the other browsers tonight, but not the one on my blog–that one seems to have saved itself at move six, which is as far as I’ve moved the pieces around.
Currently, the popup form lists First and Last Names as options in the dropdown menus for the White and Black players. What gets inserted into the code is “LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME” and only the LASTNAME shows up on the board in the post. Displaying just the User’s last name or even just the first name, though, is not really the best solution.
Under “Name” in my WP user profile there are five fields: “Username,” “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Nickname,” and “Display Name publicly as.” It would be good to be able to use the Display Name by default, following the settings on the user profile.
Overriding the last names, but keeping the first names does a little bit for anonymity, but not really much. Since WP already has the option to use a Nickname as the display name on the blog, it makes sense to have this plugin use the nickname as well, if that is set to be the Display Name. That way our friend Shark2th can keep his real name hidden on our blog, which is important to him and to his family. And if the User profile is set to display the Users real name, the plugin could pick that up from the Display Name setting as well.
Thanks again for the CBB plugin and for your help! There are a lot of really cool features you have built in to this. The ability to use CSS Themes for the chess boards is kind of exciting!
August 24th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Hi Jawboy (and Jawboy’s Dad!),
I’ve fixed the next version of the plugin so that it can be installed in a chess-by-blog subdirectory, should you prefer it that way. Your suggestion that I respect the display name by default is a good one – I’ve coded that up for the next version too.
I’m still trying to reproduce your problems with navigation. I haven’t seen any issues with IE 7 or Firefox on Windows XP, but I’ll try some other machines that I have available to me.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I just released version 1.1.1, so I’ll close this post out for comments.