photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Up until recently the limited options at WordPress.com have made me lean towards self-hosted solutions – see my old Scout group 2nd Abbotsford Port Neptune for example. There I setup Google Apps for the group and it is easy enough to drop the calendar code in to a WordPress page and thereby have easy access to even a multiple calendar solution.

My latest site wrestling with the calendar issue is for my current Scout group – 9th Brunswick Scouts. Hosted at WordPress.com, there has not been an easy way (until now) to show a GAFYD calendar. As you can see (at the time of writing) what I’ve done is use the Google Sites feature to create a page that I could then embed the calendar code in. On a subdomain if you are curious. This solution does get the job done, but doesn’t look very good (since it is hard to get a Google Sites page to match the look & feel of your WordPress site.)

Anyway, that was then and this, as they say, is now. Soon I will be upgrading 9th Brunswick to natively embed a GAFYD Google calendar – using the feature newly enabled by WordPress.

Since I had never had any success looking for more native solutions (rather than rely on Google Calendar in some form or other) this is how I have done things to date. Now, however, there are options!

An old (and one I had never found) WordPress plugin has been receiving some attention of late : Events Manager is self-described as a “wordpress event registration plugin freely available on wordpress.org. Events, bookings, calendars, locations and lots more.”

While free, Events Manager does carry a paid support option if you wish to either support the plugin or get support yourself. Once paid, you are upgraded to the ‘Pro’ version which enables you to accept PayPal payments for events.

While Events Manager was not being actively maintained (though it is now) a competitor sprang up based on the same open source code. This plugin is Events Manager Extended. At this time it remains both open source and completely free to use.

Both of these plugins offer the ability for external users to subscribe to the calendars – which is the main feature I look for when looking to provide a calendar for a community group.

I’d love to know if you’ve used either of these and what your experience has been. If I get time I do plan to test them out myself and see if they really can offer the features I need.

So if you are looking for calendar and event management on WordPress sites there are now some real choices to make!

I’ll let you know how it goes! Certainly over the week or so the site has been live there has been a steady rise in the Google rankings, which is pleasing to see.

photo credit: TerryJohnston

So I start looking around for solutions. Twitter have a Goodies area which is their official tools for adding Tweet this or Twitter accounts buttons to your site. Even better, they have a great widget builders – with a list widget! I thought I was onto something here, but is is a script – and you can’t host scripts on WordPress.com. Sad.

So what was I to do? Enter Yahoo Pipes : “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Yahoo created this incredibly useful piece of internet plumbing almost three years ago!

Huh? How can that help? More on that in a moment …

There’s enormous value in Yahoo Pipes, if you’re willing to dig deep enough. Fortunately, it is also easy for those who have created a Pipe to share it – this is where Pipes come in really handy for ‘the rest of us.’

Find a great Pipe that fits your needs: clone it to your own space (both so you know you’ll always have access even if the author deletes the original and in case the author changes the pipe so you get different outputs than you were expecting!) – yes this does mean signing in with your Yahoo account. You do have one of those, right?

Is there a Pipe to solve our problem? You bet! Here it is : Twitter List RSS – Twitter list rss pipe gives you a (so far missing) RSS feed for any publicly available list on Twitter.

Starting to fall into place? OK now here’s the good bit. WordPress.com blogs have an RSS widget – so all you need to do is grab the RSS feed from this pipe, having set it up with your desired Twitter list, and bingo you are all set.

Other interesting Pipes you might find are : Flickr: Comments on my photos by other people Give it the last bit of your Flickr address and it will give you a feed of comments on your photos made by anyone but yourself!

There are literally bajillions of Pipes out there – so get exploring. Even better, Yahoo are working on Pipes V2 Engine which is of interest if you’re going to start getting intot he plumbing business yourself

Have fun hacking Twitter lists into your WordPress.com hosted blogs!

photo credit: TheCreativePenn

I did notice in the photo on that post at Problogger you can just see me on the left edge (wearing a white t-shirt and slightly unshaven face!)

As I mentioned in my comment there, the day was a fantastic shot in the arm of enthusiasm, motivation and a sense of belonging. It is all too easy to feel disconnected (even for those of us not normally fond of human company

If an event like this appears anywhere near you – jump right in! You will be glad you did.

If you share my frustration at how long that process can take, then I have a surprise for you! There is a great, fast and free browser plugin called ScribeFire. It has been around for quite some time as a FireFox plugin. Now it is also available in Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers. As it happens, I’ve just installed it in Chrome and it is helping me compose this blog posting right now.

From the ScribeFire for Chrome page:

One of the most popular add-ons for Firefox is now available for Chrome! ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to all of your blogs.
You can post to blogs from WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, LiveJournal, or any other blog that supports the MetaWeblog or MovableType APIs.

Go for it!

UPDATE: This post was initially very messy – somehow ScribeFire (which I have found very reliable in the past) posted not just the plain text, but huge chunks of excess formatting in the HTML. That made me sad. Will have to investigate the cause…

Yes indeed – I now have been able to create accounts on a WordPress site, hook those accounts up to use a GAFYD as OpenID to log in to WordPress using the same credentials as the email hosted at Google (under a custom domain.)

Phew.

How does it work? I’m glad I asked!

The key part of the puzzle was to use the Janrain WordPress plugin that uses RPX discovery. Yeah, ‘RPX discovery’ sounds like gibberish but it is really important. Google have created their own discovery mechanism (read about it from the creator of the WP OpenID plugin) which just makes things just a little more difficult from our point of view.

In any case, once the RPX plugin is installed it will prompt you to create an account at http://rpxnow.com/ which is both painless and takes only seconds.

Next we will have to manually set the users up in WordPress. So create your new WordPress user, make a password (and yes, you do still need a strong password here because it remains a way to login to your WordPress site for the users.) I chose not to email the password out to the user, as the goal here is to present a single sign on solution.

Moving along – log yourself out of WordPress and log back in as the new user you just created. Navigate to the Profile panel for that user in the Administration area. The URL will be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/profile.php Down the bottom of that screen you’ll see an area to select a Sign-in Provider. The key is to select OpenID, then enter the base URL for your domain that is active at Google apps. So you would type http://yourdomain.com in.

Finally you’ll have to sign-in using that OpenID to create the link between this user account on your WordPress install and the account at Google apps which is the single sign on account we want our users to use.

The first time I went around the OpenID authentication I was returned to the from page of my blog with some errros on screen. Ignoring those and going back to the /wp-admin page seems to work fine. For some reason it works out fine after that.

So there you have my solution to use the credentials of your user’s email accounts hosted by Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) to log into a WordPress blog. Feedback is more than welcome, comments, tweaks, suggestions all. Get connecting!

P.S. A friend of mine has found a differing solution, WordPress.com for your domain – where you host your website at WordPress.com, still allowing Google to handle your email with GAFYD. This does not offer a single sign on, however you do get a website plus email for only $US10 per year. Great work Jodie!

Therefore I’m saving the links I’ve found here for future reference:

• Enable VPN server in OS X for remote access via iPhone, Windows, and OS X clients
• IPSecuritas “the most advanced, yet free IPSec client for Mac OS X”
• Mac Remote Desktop is as yet unreleased

That should be enough to get anyone started. Have fun!

That’s the one I tested first (WP Google Apps 1.0 on WordPress 2.8.5), with no real success. The first issue is that the plugin is nested an extra folder deep, so the automatic install won’t recognise the plugin. Once you move the files up one directory-level (from /wp-google-apps/wp-google-apps/* to /wp-google-apps/*) then WordPress can ‘see’ it.

After entering my Google apps domain on the configuration page, I logged out to test. The initial result is a server timeout when attempting to login to my blog with an account from the Google Apps domain. I tried both with the full email address and just the user name, only to have the same effect – a timeout. Checking the plugin’s sparse documentation I did note that the Google Apps account must be set to allow POP or IMAP access for this to work. A quick check showed that I did already have POP enabled. Slightly more disturbing is that the timeout persisted even when using my original credentials for the blog.

The only solution was to remove the plugin from the filesystem (I used webshell as I’m hosted on an H-Sphere control panel) – you could as easily use FTP or SSH in if you have access. Once removed (or simply compressed to save time for more attempts) I could log back in with my original administrator account.

The FAQ does note that “Unfortunately, the only way to get the plugin to work on 2.0.x is to completely wipe the dashboard.” I’m not really sure what ‘wiping the dashboard’ is though – any suggestions?

Searching the WordPress plugin repository I’ve come up with these potential solutions:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/3rd-party-authentication/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/installation/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rpx/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-apps/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/opensso-plugin/changelog/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

Now some of those look like they would be more useful in allowing a wide range of authentication options for people just leaving comments on your blog, but some look like they’d have real potential.

If you have any experience with these I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime I’ll be working my way through these, testing which will provide the best solution for the Scout group.

UPDATES:
Testing WP Google Apps
Solved? Single sign on for Google apps and WordPress

This plugin really makes it easy to upgrade WordPress, even from an old install way back at version 1.5! The author had finished development when WordPress announced the native ability to upgrade, however this gives us hope it may work for a while yet. Great news for those who find the native update doesn’t work for them.