Discontinued

This project has been discontinued because the LDSsearch.com search engine is no longer operational. The source is left here because it might be useful for other people creating a RSS aggregating plugin

LDSlinks

A plugin for Wordpress by Jacob Brunson .

What is it?

LDSlinks is a plugin for Wordpress which displays LDS oriented links based on phrase that you give it.  It uses the LDSsearch.com search engine to lookup and provide the links.

The plugin will create a 150 pixel wide box with three "Related Links" to sites based on the phrase you gave it.  The box will only appear on the post's page; ie. it will only appear when there is a single post displayed on the page, not on the home page, category pages, or archive pages.

To see a sample, see this post with Gordon B. Hinckley Quotes.

Why should I use it?

It is important that Internet users find positive LDS content when they are looking for it.  LDSlinks provides links to positive LDS content to both human users and search engine robots.  Search engines often calculate the importance of a web page by how many other web pages link to it; so by providing these LDS links, you are helping the search engines find that LDS content is important.

Releases

Version Date Notes Download
5 12/12/2006 Better formatting, extra options parameters, updated backend zip
4 15/11/2006 Improved link selection algorithm zip
3 11/11/2006 Initial Release zip


Installing

Installing is pretty easy.  Follow these instructions.  If you need additional help, please see the Wordpress documentation about installing plugins.
  1. Unzipping the package should produce a directory called ldslinks.  
  2. Move this directory into your Wordpress wp-content/plugins directory.  
  3. Set the permissions on the wp-content/plugins/ldslinks/cache directory to be read and writable by the web server. See these Wordpress instructions if you need help.
  4. Add the following code to your Wordpress theme:
    <?php echo LDSlinks(); ?>
    This (in most cases) should go into your Main Index Template (index.php) into a section called "The Loop" (although it probably won't be labeled as "The Loop" in your theme.)  You can place the code anywhere in "The Loop" although I suggest putting it right before the tag for "the_content" so that it will appear just to the right of your post content.
  5. Activate the plugin in your Wordpress dashboard.  
That is all you have to do to install the plugin.  You have to provide a phrase for each post that you want to display these LDS links.  See Using below.

Using

For each post that you want related LDS links to show, you must give the system a query phrase such as "joseph smith" or "mormon doctrine."  You do this with the Custom Fields portion of the Write/Edit Post page.  The key you should use is ldslink and the value should be your query phrase. For more information about using custom fields, see the Usage section of the Using Custom Fields Wordpress documentation page.

Advanced options

These options help you to override the default options. They really aren't that advanced, but do take an extra step or two beyond the basic setup.

Default number of links

The default number of links shown is 3. You can change this starting with version 5. If you want to change this, then put this tag into your template instead (replacing the number 4 with your number):
<?php if (function_exists('LDSlinks')) echo LDSlinks('',4); ?>

Output Format

On some sites the default formatting doesn't always work. Starting with version 5, there is another output mode which will display an ordered list with less formatting. You can use it as is, or you can use your stylesheet to style it as you want. I like using it right after the post content. To turn on this output mode, use this tag instead:
<?php if (function_exists('LDSlinks')) echo LDSlinks('',4,'ol'); ?>
where 4 is the number of links to display (see above).

Contributing

This plugin is released the the LGPL license.  Contributions or comments are welcome by visiting my announcement on my religion blog.