levork.org

Hopefully a minor release. What’s new:

• The plugin can now be installed one subdirectory lower – i.e. if you unzip while in the WordPress plugins directory and leave all the files where they are, it should still work correctly. This should make installation simpler.
• PGN comments are now supported. They will be shown in the status field when you click on the corresponding entry in the game log. Game entries in the log which have comments are shown in italic (in the default themes). Recursive Annotated Variations are, for now, treated as comments.
• Event, round, date, and location information is now displayed with the board (this can be configured on or off).
• The “JsCom” tag is now supported. This can be used to specify a starting display position for the board which is not the last move. The syntax is: [JsCom "startply X"], where X is the starting halfmove (i.e. specifying 5 will show the board after White’s 3rd move).
• The plugin will now try to respect the display name preference of players. (This can only be done when the board is first created, it is not dynamic.)
• Some compatibility issues related to WordPress blog theme style sheets have been fixed.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.1.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

By the way, since a lot of my users seem to be overseas, I’m looking for volunteers to help with internationalization – this would amount to translating the strings that are in the user interface. If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

§ 15 Responses to Chess By Blog 1.1.1"

• Don says:

  September 17, 2008 at 6:16 am

  Hello,

  How does one “play” on the “playable” screen, by comments? By drag and drop? Nothing seems to work!?

  http://www.tdbellenterprises.com/dbblog/2008/09/17/chess-game-game-1/
• levork says:

  September 17, 2008 at 8:33 am

  Just click on the piece you want to move, click on the square that you want it to move to. I tried the board on your web page and it worked just fine for me on every browser/operating system that I have available to me.

  FYI, I notice that you have an “open” game on your web page. This means that anyone can come along and play the game, but the moves will not be saved in the post, it’s only local to the copy of the game that’s running in the user’s local browser. This mode is designed for presenting chess problems. In order to have a persistent game you have to choose registered users for each side in advance, and only those users can make persistent moves, all other users of the site can only see the game in progress.

  Hope this clarifies things.
• Don says:

  September 17, 2008 at 8:41 am

  I opened it up when I couldn’t make a move on white, which was assigned to me, and black was open. (Unless that doesn’t work, it doesn’t seem like it now in reading this…) Hmm, now to get a player to register, which may be an issue with my blog right now. Thanks, I like what I see, and I’ll get it set up right.

  Don
• Pierre-Marie says:

  November 7, 2008 at 2:12 pm

  Hi,

  First of all thanks a lot for a great plugin. I am using it for the chess afterschool class in my school. Since it involves young kids we don’t publish the url.

  To present problems to solve, there is no problems.

  For closed games, we have mixed results. Sometimes when the users are logged in they ccannot make moves, especially if they play black. I was wondering if there is a limit of closed games that can be run at the same time?

  Also, as an idea, would it be hard to ajax the plugin in the such a way that the board refreh itself without having to do a full reload for each player to take turn to post a move?

  Many thanks in advance
• levork says:

  November 7, 2008 at 2:44 pm

  Hi Pierre-Marie,

  It’s cool to hear that you’re using the plugin in your class!

  I can’t think of a reason why there would be a limit with closed games, but admittedly I haven’t run scenarios with many games in parallel. Do your players go to individual wordpress post page with a single closed game, or do they go to a main page which has several closed games going at once? Does it make a difference either way?

  I will also run some tests to see what happens.

  As far as automatic board refresh: I think it would also be a nice feature. Unfortunately, ajax doesn’t really support “server push”, so it’s not easy, especially in Javascript. At some level, you end up emulating it with regular polling. There are other ways of doing this using “Comet” – which I think ends up holding a persistent connection to the web server. For a chess application, perhaps polling the server every 30 seconds (or some user specified interval) may just be sufficient. I’ll give it some thought.
• Pierre-Marie says:

  November 7, 2008 at 5:17 pm

  Thanks for the quick answer.

  I am always looking for ways to improve learning. And also have fun in the process. I am not the chess teacher but I always have enjoyed the game even if I am a terrible player. I am actually the French teacher.

  The kids think it’s cool that you work for Pixar.

  The kids have responded very well to the chess blog. It is hosted by mindphase and we never had a problem with them.
  I just updated wordpress to the latest version, the template is Blue grace By Prelovac. He also has developed a Wall plugin that can act as a pseudo chat room, so the kids leave a comment when they are done with their move and the other player knows it’s time to reload and play. The problem is that WordPress doesn’t allow duplicate comments and there is so many way one can say “your turn”. But even if it’s not ideal we make it work for us and I’ll look if there is a way to allow for duplicate comments until I find a real chat plugin.

  The closed games are all in individual posts. All the users have at least suscriber status. 4 of the chess kids are also my students so we tested it in my class and had 3 games all in different posts running at the same time. No problem. Then later in the day, all hell broke loose. The day after it worked again.
  We tested with Firefox, Safari and IE. The best browser was Firefox but IE was working all right when it let the kids actually log in.

  I did not put all the games in the same post but I can try that one to. I won’t see the kids until Monday and will try again with them.

  I went to look at what “comet” is and it would do the trick. A self refreshing board would certainly be nice.

  If you want to see the blog I can email you the url.
• Peter says:

  December 11, 2008 at 11:05 am

  Hi,
  Do you think that you would be able to provide us with an update for WordPress 2.7 because the current version is not working
  Thanks in advance,
  Peter
• levork says:

  December 11, 2008 at 11:11 am

  Hi Peter -

  sorry to hear that the plugin doesn’t work in 2.7. I am a little busy with work and personal issues (family members are sick) but I hope that once my vacation begins (in 10 days) I will be able to devote a good chunk of time to this software, fixing it for WordPress 2.7 shouldn’t be a problem.
• milchbaum says:

  December 18, 2008 at 1:50 pm

  Hey,

  i would love 2 use ur plugin, unfortunately it´s not working with WordPress 2.7 (no board is shown at all).
  So long, greats from Germany.
• levork says:

  December 20, 2008 at 10:24 am

  Peter, milchbaum –

  I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7 and the plugin seems to be working fine. Perhaps this is a theme issue: what themes are you guys using?
• Brian says:

  December 21, 2008 at 6:32 am

  Hi,
  I seem to also be having issues that I guess are related to 2.7. I installed Chess by Blog after already being at 2.7 so I have no prior experience with how it worked with earlier versions of wordpress. My site theme is called Illacrimo, and it can be found here: http://designdisease.com/portfolio/illacrimo/.

  If I understand it correctly simply inserting the pgn into my post body should result in a game board, but instead the only result I get is the pgn in the body. Now, that being said, using the Chess by Blog button from the HTML edit tab will produce a board. So one way works, but not the other.

  I think if this can be fixed I could enjoy using this plugin and I think it’s a terrific idea. Feel free to send me an email if you have any testing suggestions or tips to try or need any additional info from me.
• levork says:

  December 21, 2008 at 8:50 am

  Hi Brian -

  You need to wrap your PGN in a DIV tag with a special CSS class before the plugin will render it. Try doing this:

  <div class="CBB-board" style="display:hidden;">
  your pgn here
  </div>
  
• Brian says:

  December 21, 2008 at 11:03 am

  Okay, time for me to go back and take a closer look at the documentation. How did I miss that?

  Anyway, thanks a bunch for the followup. I tried it in a draft post and yes, it worked perfectly. Now to bug the hell out of my friends and post games I’ve played against them.
• Peter says:

  January 1, 2009 at 7:52 am

  Hi Levork,

  Thanks for your comments. I just want to confirm that my system is now running smotthly after reinstalling the plugin, seems to be a problem on my webspace.

  Sorry for any inconvenience caused and by the way: Happy new year

  regards,
  Peter
• levork says:

  January 2, 2009 at 1:08 pm

  I just released version 1.1.2, which fixes some minor 2.7 WordPress compatibility issues and adds an automatic refresh for live games. I’ll close this post out for new comments.