Comments on: Fortune Widget 0.3

By: Jason Mock

Jason Mock — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:37:19 +0000

Thanks! Fortunately I’ve had the luck that the basics for a widget API hasn’t changed that much. I still need to get it into the widget database though…

By: Besim Karadeniz

Besim Karadeniz — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:56:59 +0000

Excellent widget… one of the oldest plugins I’m using and it works since 2.6 without any problems. Epic work.

By: WordPress Widget List | WordPress Blog Design SEO - Customizations - Websites - Tutorials

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:18:40 +0000

[...] Fortune Widget – Fortune widget (Random Quotes), with some simple customizations and easy install. [...]

By: Jason Mock

Jason Mock — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:21:26 +0000

It’s good to see a variety of plugins available, especially with quotes, since quotes can be quite difficult to come by if you don’t already run a unix/linux system or have the technical know how to create quotes. The only downfall that I would raise about off-loaded storage, or any kind, the performance hit when the WordPress has to contact other websites / offsite servers to derive a given page. It might be worth while to recommend a page caching plugin in conjunction with wordpress-fortune-plugin…

By: Mick Dakota

Mick Dakota — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:05:33 +0000

I’ve done some work on a similar but unrelated project. It is a fortune plugin for the main page.

http://mickdakota.com/wordpress-fortune-plugin

It uses the fortunemod.com API on the net so doesn’t require any local fortune files or parsing scripts. The downside is that you can’t create your own cookies. The upside is that you can just set it and forget it and get immediate access to a huge collection of quotes from 50-60 of the top fortune databases.

As it is targeted at the content region you also are not limited to your sidebar width as you would typically be with a widget, so you get much better display formatting.

By: Jason Mock

Jason Mock — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:54:37 +0000

Not a problem! I’m just glad that it worked out for you.

By: satoshi

satoshi — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:26:53 +0000

Hey! I finally got around to playing some more and after I copied the fortune.php file into wp-content/widgets/fortune/ it worked fine! Thanks for the help, dude!

By: Jason Mock

Jason Mock — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:16:09 +0000

Well, first of all I have to apologize because I didn’t realize how behind I was in regards to this being updated for the widgets plugin being integrated into WordPress. I, out of a sleep deprived state, must have changed it to work and never updated the plugin for everyone else. That being said, the change I made was to move the fortune directory to wp-content/plugins. Both widget_fortune() and widget_fortune_control() both use a $baseFortunesDir, which “should” be identical. IF they are both identical, double check the permissions of the files such that the web server can read the appropriately. The next possible thing, is to make sure that the fortune.php script is in the same directory, as this is needed to actually read the fortune file. Unfortunately, out of my continued sleep deprived state, I didn’t write a very good validation / error message routine for that (this actually may be the most likely scenario).

I do plan, after seeing all this, that I plan to write in some improvements such as a single variable for the location with a corrected path, and better output to indicate that everything is in order. Let me know what you find out, because I’d really like to get you working…

By: satoshi

satoshi — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:35:30 +0000

Actually, the plugin wants them in wp-content/plugins/widgets/fortune (at least, the version I downloaded from wordpress.org does). I put both calvin and my own cookie there and it lets me choose them now in the widget config thing, but it displays this error when I view the page: “Unable to find fortune file swadsall,” where swadsall is the fortune cookie I made It does the same thing with calvin. Both the index and the .dat file are there.

By: Jason Mock

Jason Mock — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:30:37 +0000

Just a heads up that things have been pretty busy in my life as of late. Probably within the next couple of days I can look into what is going on. I just wanted to make sure you know that I’m not ignoring you.

Until then, without looking at the plugin because it has been a while, the first think I would look at is make sure that you have fortune index and fortune file located in the fortunes directory under [BLOG]/wp-content/plugins/fortune. That is the location the script is going to look for these files. Additionally for it to work correctly, it MUST have both the index and the dat file (I.E. for calvin, the files are “calvin” and “calvin.dat”). Definitely let me know if this doesn’t help you, otherwise, as I mentioned, I will be looking at what might be going on in the next couple of days.