For example, the Friary Outer development is an ongoing story that we’re covering. All of the related articles are tagged with “Friary Outer” and can be seen here: http://lichfieldlive.co.uk/tag/friary-outer/

Clicking on any one of them you will see a list at the bottom of the article of all the articles related to that story, with the most recent at the top.

This is achieved by adding the following shortcode to each post:

[story-latest tag="friary-outer"]

The plugin replaces that with the list of posts. Great for any site that has multiple posts on the same topic and wants to group them easily.

Download now from WordPress.org. Feedback welcome in the comments or at WordPress.org.

Thanks to their efforts we now have a site where we can view planning alerts for each council across the country. Not all councils are there yet, but it’s a great start.

As expected, the applications are available as XML, JSON and GeoRSS, which made it easy for me to – in two hours – produce a WordPress plugin that allows any self-hosted WordPress site to display a widget of recent planning applications.

You can download the plugin right now from WordPress.org. If you fancy contributing, it’s also on Github.

At the moment, there’s just the widget. I plan to add the ability to add lists of planning applications into posts and pages, as well as maps pinpointing each application.

Comments welcome!

This meant that the link to your site’s front page was taken away and you now have to go through drop down menus to get to the link.

Instead, this plugin puts that link back onto your admin interface.

Download now!

The basic aim was to hide the contents of topics in a bbPress 2.0 forum from any users not logged in. This makes for a nice private forum.

I found suggestions about making forums hidden, private and so on but none of them really worked as they hid them for logged in users too.

My final solution was to make bbPress ‘dumb’ when it comes to logged out users. I.e., it could either be clever and say “there are topics, but you’re not allowed to see them until you login” or it could just say “there are no topics”.

The following code does the latter, dumb version by hooking into the forums, topics and replies loops.

{code type=php}function pj_hla_logged_in_topics($have_posts){
if (!is_user_logged_in()){
$have_posts = null;
}
return $have_posts;
}
add_filter(‘bbp_has_topics’, ‘pj_hla_logged_in_topics’);
add_filter(‘bbp_has_forums’, ‘pj_hla_logged_in_topics’);
add_filter(‘bbp_has_replies’, ‘pj_hla_logged_in_topics’);{/code}

I simply placed this within my theme’s functions.php but you could just as easily wrap this in a plugin.

The Walled Garden is a community-supported agriculture project set mostly within the listed walls that once stood part of the Fisherwick Hall Estate. Jess and I joined in July and for our £38.80 per month we get a box full of vegetables every week which I collect on my bike.

It’s a great project where we chip in as well and there are some exciting developments ahead. I also wanted to help by offering my skills as a WordPress developer and so I built a web site for new and existing members.

The aim was to create a site which informed potential new members about the project, allowed them to sign up online whilst also distributing updates to current members which would be available online for anyone interested to see.

Here’s how I did it;

• Starting with a simple WordPress site I modified a newsletter to create the welcome page which outlined what The Walled Garden is all about and why it’s such a great idea!
• I’d already created a video tour of the place for Lichfield Live, which I embedded on another page for all to see.
• Then, using the most excellent Gravity Forms plugin (a must have plugin) I built a sign up form. Using pricing fields it automatically calculates the price to pay based on the size of box you want and the membership fee.
• When submitted the form does a number of things. It;
• sends Annamarie at Woodhouse an e-mail with the details of the new member
• creates a new WordPress user account for the member for future use
• Adding a user account was also crucial for the next step; sending out updates by e-mail. This is my favourite bit! Instead of sending out e-mails to all the members each week, Annamarie now creates a new post in WordPress and once published, the post is automatically e-mailed out to all the members, using the Subscribe by Email plugin. Now anyone visiting the site can even see what they’ll be getting each week!
• Lastly, I wanted to make sure that the whole system wasn’t overcomplicated for Annamarie. WordPress can be quite daunting, especially if all you need to do is add a new post. So I’ve used the excellent Easy Blogging plugin to present a really simple, streamlined interface.

I’ve taken screenshots of the site, including that simple dashboard, which you can check out below.

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/Ninadawesldc/status/133285420699095042"]

Where else do you get a council chief exec tweeting her webby on a Sunday evening about the Open Government License?!

Fantastic!

Maybe I’m just being optimistic given my well-known loathing of Local People but it’s as if Northcliffe have decided that  receiving £7k for each new Local People site is much better than forking out £6k for a ‘community publisher’.

In launching a franchise “opportunity” the Local People network is now much more like the About My Area and The Best Of networks. Does this then mean that the network is not so much competing with existing grass-roots hyperlocal sites anymore?

Either way, if this represents a slowing down of the roll-out of Local People sites that is a good thing for communities everywhere as far as I’m concerned. The less glorified discussion forums we have threatening the existence of Northcliffe’s own papers the better.

One concern is that pricing a hyperlocal site at £7k has the effect of bringing the hyperlocal bubble that I fear we’re seeing in the US over to the UK. While there is still no clear business model for successful hyperlocal, pumping £7k into such a site with no clear route to a return is surely suicidal.

Of course, this franchise model could see Local People go the way of About My Area and The Best Of and become much more business-oriented and far less about the news. Not that they carry much quality news at the moment anyway….

One important feature is that I’ve locked in compatibility only to v3.2.1 and older. If you’re using a version of WordPress prior to 3.2.1 you won’t be able to activate. Upgrade!

Secondly, while the original version only allowed you to place the bio of the current post’s author (i.e. it would print my bio here because I’m the author of this post), you can now specify an author using one of three methods.

Here’s some examples…

Show the current post author’s bio:

[author_bio]

Display the author bio of the author with user ID #4:

[author_bio id="4"]

Display the author bio of the author whose username is ‘bobby’:

[author_bio username="bobby"]

Display the bio of the author whose e-mail address is me@example.com:

[author_bio email="me@example.com"]

This is really useful for creating a “team” page on your site.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, leave them here or on the WordPress.org forums.

If you use it and it works, please leave a rating and mark it as working on it’s WordPress.org plugin page!

You can download from WordPress.org now.

Any issues/requests, use the comments below.

This week Lichfield Live launched a business directory, in part because the alternative is so out of date!

Today I’m annoyed because they’ve decided to be all community-hugging and have the residents of Lichfield vote for their favourite pubs.

Number 9 has been shut for years (see screenshot below)!

Not only that but this is supposed to be a local media web site. In that case, what are “Best UK Pubs Ltd”, “Crown at Lichfield Ltd” and “Lloyds No One”?

I’ll tell you – they’re the legal names of the place known locally as Samuel’s (or Sammy’s), The Crown and Gatehouse.

Great work, “Local” People network.