Tuxlog – Wordpress & Linux

This Page contains the english manual of wp-greet, the first greetingcard plugin for wordpress.

wp-greet is a WordPress plugin to send greetingcards from your WordPress blog.
wp-greet uses the plugin NextGenGallery (http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/), version 0.94 or higher, to manage the greetingcards. wp-greet version 1.3 or higher requires WordPress version ≥2.5 and NextGenGallery version ≥1.0.0. It is tested with WordPress up to version 2.9.1 and NextGenGallery up to version 1.4.3.

Topic 1. to 4. of this documentation assume that you have alreay installed NextGenGallery version 0.94 or higher. If you haven’t yet installed NextGenGallery you find a short installing instruction under topic 5.

wp-greet offers several options to avoid spam and to keep spambots from using your greetingcards as spam mail. wp-greet supports the plugins Captcha!, where a captcha code has to be entered before sending a card, or the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, where a simple sum has to be calculated. You find some informations to the Captcha!-Plugin under topic 6 and to the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin under topic 7.

This documentation relates to wp-greet version 2.5.

1. Installation and preparations:

After downloading and unzipping wp-greet.zip upload all files on your webspace into the directory /wp-content/plugins and activate the plugin wp-greet under ‘Plugins’.

1.a Updating from wp-greet version 1.1 or newer:
If you have already installed wp-greet version 1.1 or newer, simply delete all old files from the directory “wp-content/plugins/wp-greet” and upload the new files, or use the automatic update function. Using either method be sure to:
- make a copy of your wp-greet.css-file and upload it after updating, if you have made any changes to it
- deactivate and reactivate the plugin once to let it execute necessary database changes

1.b Updating from a wp-greet version older than 1.1:

• First delete the old version completely.
• Upload the new version.
• Deactivate and reactivate the plugin.
• If necessary, adjust the settings in phpmailer-conf.php.
• Delete the patched version of nggfunctions.php and copy back the original version.
• Change all tags [gallery …] to [gallery=ID] (replacing “ID” with the gallery’s ID), the ususal way to call a gallery within NextGenGallery. The former additional parameters are no longer necessary.
• There must be at least one page or posting containig the tag [wp-greet].
• Adjust wp-greet’s settings in the admin-area and check the galleries you wish to use for sending as greetingcards.

2. Settings:
After activating the plugin you find in your WordPress admin menu a new menu item wp-greet with the submenus Galleries, Security and (if activated, see below) Logging. Here you can change all settings and control the logfile.

Here you can see an overview of the possible workflows:

wp-greet:

• “Gallery Plugin”: the gallery plugin wp-greet will use (at the moment only NextGenGallery is possible).
• “Form-Post/Page”: the posting or page that contains the tag [wp-greet].
• “Mailtransfermethod”: either SMTP or PHP()mail are used to send your greetingcards. If you choose SMTP, you might have to adjust the settings in your phpmailer-conf.php, depending on your webhoster. If you choose PHP, the PHP function mail() is used. The greetingcards can only be sent inline within your mails in SMTP mode. In PHP mode the cards are sent as an attachment.
• “Mailreturnpath”: enter an E-mail address where undelivered cards are being sent back to.
• “Send BCC to”: enter an E-mail address to send a copy of each sent card to (when activating this, you should inform your readers and card-senders about it).
• “Allow more than one recipient”: allows to send a card to more than one recipient. The emailadresses in the form have to be seperated by a comma.
• “Send image inline”: activate this when you want your graphics and pictures to be displayed within the mail and not as an attachment (only possible in SMTP mode, see above).
• “Fetch cards online”: activate this when you don’t want the card to be sent directly to the receiver but when he should receive a notification mail with a link that leads him to a subpage of your blog where he can have a look at the card.
• If “Fetch cards online” is activated, indicate the number of days during which the card can be picked up under “Number of days an online card can be fetched”.
• “Online card HTML mail text”: enter the text that the receiver will see in the notification mail when “Fetch cards online” is activated. HTML is allowed, you can use the following placeholders:
  • %receiver% for the name of the receiver of the greetingcard
  • %sender% for the name of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %sendermail% for the emailadress of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %link% for the link the receiver has to click in the notification mail
  • %duration% for the time the link is valid
• “Fixed image width”: enter a fixed width for your graphics and pictures, which should not be wider than the width of the content-area of your blog (but avoid uploading pictures of much larger size, as the scaling-down also reduces their quality).
• “Add stamp image”: enter the path to a graphic file that wp-greet will use like a stamp in the upper right corner of every sent card. To use the stamp enclosed in wp-greet’s download package enter the path “wp-content/plugins/wp-greet/defaultstamp.jpg”. To use your own stamp just upload your own graphic and adjust the path. If you don’t want to use a stamp, leave the path blank.
• “Stampwidth in % of imagewidth”: if you are using a stamp, enter its width here.
• “Use NGG data for image”: The meta-informations from NextGenGallery for the display of the picture are applied. If no stamp is used, the description from NextGenGallery is additionally displayed under the picture in the form.
• “Enable Smileys on greetcard form”: activate this if you want to enable smileys to be displayed and sent within your greetingcards.
• When “Allow sending cards in the future” is activated, a future date can be specified when the card will be sent
• “Use informations from profile”: activate this if you want to display your own blog’s e-mail address (‘Settings -> General -> E-mail address’) automatically as the ‘Sender’-e-mail address in the mailform.
• “Enable logging”: activate this if you want to store data about the sent cards in your database and view the statistics under “Logging”.
• “Default mail subject”: enter a default mail subject here (this can be overwritten by the sender).
• “Default mail header” and “Default mail footer”: enter text here that will appear at the top and the bottom of each sent card.
• “Number of days log entries are stored”: enter the number of days that you want the log entries to be saved.
• “Number of days card entries are stored”: enter the number of days that you want the card entries to be saved.

Save your changes by clicking “Update Options”.

Galleries:
Check the NextGenGallery-galleries with the pictures you want to use as greetingcards.

Security:

• “Spam protection”: choose which antispam plugin you would like to use.
• “Minimum role to send card”: choose if either any visitor of your blog is allowed to send cards or only registered users, and which user role is necessary to send cards.
• “Enable Terms of Usage display and check”: if you want every user to accept your terms of usage for your greetingcards before sending a card, mark this checkbox. If your theme’s footer.php contains the function wp_footer(), the terms of usage will open in a nice thickbox, otherwise they will open in a new window.
• “Terms of usage”: If “Enable Terms of Usage display and check” is activated, you can customize the terms of usage here. HTML is allowed.
• “Use mail to verify sender address”: By checking this box your greetingcards will not be sent directly after the “Send”-Button is hit, but the sender will receive an email containing a link he has to click. After he has done this the card will be sent to the receiver.
• “Verification mail text”: enter the text that the sender will see in the notification mail when “Use mail to verify sender address” is activated. HTML is allowed, you can use the following placeholders:
  • %sender% for the name of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %sendermail% for the emailadress of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %receiver% for the name of the receiver of the greetingcard
  • %link% for the link the receiver has to click in the notification mail
  • %duration% for the time the link is valid
• “Link valid time (hours)” enter the number of hours the link is valid if “Verification mail text” is activated.
• “Confirmation mail to sender”: By checking this box the sender will receive a confirmation mail after the receiver picked up his card.
• “Confirmation mail text”: enter the text that the sender will see in the notification mail when “Confirmation mail to sender” is activated. HTML is allowed, you can use the following placeholders:
  • %sender% for the name of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %sendermail% for the emailadress of the sender of the greetingcard
  • %receiver% for the name of the receiver of the greetingcard
  • %link% for the link the receiver has to click in the notification mail
  • %duration% for the time the link is valid
• “Mandatory fields” mark the fields the sender has to fill out before sending a card.

Save your changes by clicking “Update Options”.

Logging:
When “enable logging” is activated in wp-greet setup, you can view the statistics of your sent greetingcards here. Since wp-greet version 1.3 you can choose how many items are shown on one page. At the bottom of the page you can delete the logfile by clicking “Clear log”. If you click this, there will be no further request if you really want to delete – once you click the button your data will be deleted.

3. Usage:

a. Add a new gallery for your greetingcards in the administration area of NextGen Gallery and upload your greetingcards into this gallery.

b. Write a new page with the content [wp-greet] and a link underneath to the page that contains the gallery (see topic c.), for example “<a href=”http://your-domain.com/mycards”>Click here</a> to go back to the greetingcards overview”, otherwise only a blank page will be seen after sending the card. Name this page e.g. “greet”.
Then publish this page and exclude it from the pages list. If you are using widgets this is very easy: just insert the page ID under “Exclude” and click “Save Changes”. If you are not using widgets, edit the file sidebar.php and change <?php wp_list_pages(); ?> to <?php wp_list_pages(‘exclude=ID’); ?> and replace “ID” with the ID of your just published page.

c. Write another page in which your greetingcard gallery will show up. To call the gallery, insert [gallery=ID] and replace “ID” with the ID of the page from topic a. Name this page e.g. “mycards” and publish the page.

d. To send a greetingcard, browse to “http://your-domain.com/mycards”, replacing this link with your own URL. Choose one of your cards by clicking on it. Another page opens where the card in its original size appears, underneath are the fields for sender, recipient, subject and text. After filling out these fields you can click “Preview” to preview your greetingcard and then either click “Back” to go back or “Send” to send the card.

e. You can also add greetingcards into a post instead of a page. To do so, just insert [gallery=ID] like in topic c. into your post – of course by replacing ID and URL with yours.

f. The text of your greetingcards can include smilies, if this function is enabled in the options. There are a few smilies in the directory wp-greet/smilies (these are from kolobok.us), you can easily exchange them by deleting them and/or adding new ones. To change the smilies’ order just change the numbers of the gif-files.

4. Adjusting the design

To adjust the design of your greetingcard page edit the file wp-greet.css.

If you have a narrow theme you might adjust the width of the textarea
textarea.wp-greet-form { width: 90%; } by replacing the 90% with something smaller than this.

To add a border to your greetingcard preview add to your stylesheet something like
.wp-greet-form img { border: 1px solid #a9a9a9; padding: 4px;}

5. Very short instruction to the installation of NextGen Gallery:

Upload the unzipped directory nextgen-gallery into the directory wp-plugins on your webspace and activate the plugin. Click “Gallery” in the menu bar and then “Options” to adjust the settings, e.g. the path where your greetingcards will be saved, or the size of the greetingcard thumbnails.
There are further explanations and links to documentations to NextGen Gallery on the plugin’s homepage: http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

6. Short instruction to the Usage of the Captcha! Plugin:

Upload the unzipped directory “captcha” on your webspace into wp-content/plugins and activate the plugin.
To create a captcha code you need at least one truetype font. NextGen Gallery uses truetype fonts for creating watermarks in the pictures and has an integrated folder for truetype fonts. You can use this folder for Captcha! as well and don’t have to create an extra one for Captcha!.
Under “Settings/Captcha!” adjust the path to the font directory to: home/www/…/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/fonts/ and under “TTF Files” adjust the names of your fonts (you can upload more than one font into the directory). If you check “Image Distortion” it shows the captcha images in a distorted way, which is a more effective spam protection but also harder to read for humans.

After saving your settings you can deactivate the plugin. If you do so, the captcha protection only shows up on your greetingcards pages. If you do not deactivate it a captcha protection is added to your comment form, so that every commenter on your blog has to type a captcha code before sending off a comment.

7. Short instruction to the Usage of the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin:

Upload the unzipped directory “math-comment-spam-protection” on your webspace into wp-content/plugins and activate the plugin. Under Settings -> Math Comment Spam klick “Update Options” once even without having changed any options, otherwise the plugin won’t work. You don’t have to change the text of the error messages here as these are fixed within wp-greet.
If you don’t want to use the plugin for your comments form as well, you have to deactivate it after updating the options.

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