Comments on: BibleGateway Verse-of-the-Day

By: Dave Zaikos

Dave Zaikos — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:25:58 +0000

Yes, I will add this version if it’s available for the verse of the day.

By: Kurt Gwartney

Kurt Gwartney — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 16:36:04 +0000

I see the new CEB is on the Bible Gateway site. Can it be added to the list in the plug in? We just started using this and really like it. Thanks for all the hard work on this plug in. Kurt Gwartney, minister of communications.

By: Dave Zaikos

Dave Zaikos — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:54:48 +0000

The verse is handled client-side so this would have to be done with JavaScripting after the content is loaded. I am planning to release an updated version in the near future that utilizes jQuery to make JSON requests (this would prevent the page loading from pausing if Bible Gateway’s web site was running a bit slow), but because WordPress is merely injecting JavaScript into the page, there’s nothing internal that would allow for excerpting.

This kind of ties in with an earlier comment and the solution would be the same: Have WordPress query Bible Gateway on a cron schedule, cache the verse and serve it up. If the verse were cached, WordPress could manipulate it any way we want. It could even be pluggable so one could add an “apply_filters” in their functions.php theme file to filter the text in some way. I suppose it could be done—I’ll consider it—but I can’t promise it for the next release.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:19:58 +0000

Is it possible to excerpt or truncate the verse of the day results? I’d like to display an excerpted version on our homepage and link it to the post.

I only want to truncate this post and no others.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

By: Dave Zaikos

Dave Zaikos — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:10:03 +0000

Yes, I have considered this solution as well. Delays on BibleGateway.com’s end could be circumvented by using WordPress’s internal cron schedule to do the fetching and cache the results. It would only need to be done once daily (around 5:00 a.m. UTC). Using cron would result in WordPress fetching the verse during a load that is not associated with displaying the web site to the visitor; so there would be no slow down. However, I am reluctant to implement this because it depends on the web server being able to fetch external data and BibleGateway.com may not have updated their verse during the load, which means we’d have to make multiple attempts to get the new verse. It honestly seems like a waste of server resources for something so small.

To be quite honest, the best solution would be for BibleGateway to allow a JSONP request for the information. This would let us skip their JavaScript code altogether and use jQuery to load the content and display it as we see fit.

Nevertheless, there are a few options I’m looking at and plan to test for the next release.

Update: It looks like Bible Gateway has updated their site to support JSON requests. This means I can update the plugin so it loads the verse after the rest of the page has loaded. Not sure when I’ll have the update out, but you can expect that in the next version.

By: nikedunkhi

nikedunkhi — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:51:09 +0000

A possible solution is loaded in the back lines from BibleGateway using PHP to open a remote URL. However, if the BibleGateway shut down or running slowly, it will cause major problems loading the page or time out.
The opinion post above by them maybe right !

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:35:30 +0000

Hi Jeeva, Inside your PHP code you would do something like this: echo do_shortcode( '[bible-votd]' ); All of the available options for the shortcode are also usable. So you can force the use of, for example, the KJV by using: echo do_shortcode( '[bible-votd ver="9"]' );

By: Jeeva Pakerla

Jeeva Pakerla — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 07:21:41 +0000

Hi,
I am trying to have the plugin show up on the home page. For which I need to include code in a PHP file. The plugin works fine in a post or a page. But how do I get to show up the plugin using the short code in the PHP file. Is there a seperate PHP code to show the plugin in the website. Please let me know how I can fix this error.

Thanks,
Jeeva

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:45:05 +0000

If I understand you correctly, you want each verse of the day to almost as a new post in its own category? That’s really not the function of this plugin. The plugin simply pulls BibleGateway.com’s verse of the day and inserts it wherever the shortcode or widget exists.

The shortcode option is there because it lets users put the verse on a page. That it works within posts is a carry-over to the way WordPress processes text. I could have removed the option but it would be an extra line of code to do it and didn’t seem necessary.

Having BibleGateway’s verse appear as a new post is certainly possible for a plugin based on the way WordPress is built but beyond the scope of this particular plugin.

By: Gayatri

Gayatri — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:15:15 +0000

Hey.
So a little confused.
I installed this on a client site, and I put the shortcode in a post.
What I really want is for this to refresh daily and show up in a ‘category’ called daily verse every day.

How can i do this?