Request for help: Hacking with Favorites, a wordpress plugin

[Aharon Varady]

Recently on FB, a Jewish educator asked if we could add a feature whereby users could save their favorite Open Siddur posts to a list saved on the site. That way they could tag their favorite posts and come back to read them later or even, possibly, share their list of favorite posts with others. 

I thought about this for a moment, and checked back in with a wordpress plugin that hadn't worked well a year ago called 'Favorites.' Favorites code is available on Github, here: https://github.com/kylephillips/favorites

After about an hour, I had the plugin working pretty well on opensiddur.org. You can see it working too by going to https://opensiddur.org/favorites (you'll also need to add some favorite posts to your favorite lists).

Seeing the plugin working immediately helped me to realize that we could build some basic Open Siddur functionality for people using the site to cobble together resources that they could render as a PDF (or print to paper).

There are a few steps to get from the current capabilities of the plugin to something like what I'm imagining.

1. Sortable list elements. Currently the favorites list isn't sortable by jQuery or any other fancy JS tricks. But if users are going to have the ability to put in their own order the prayers and readings they've "favorited,"  then this feature will be necessary.

2. Making lists accessible. Currently the favorites list is only accessible from the web browser of the user. (The plugin works for anonymous users as well as logged-in users. Data is stored in browser cookies.) It would be great for users to be able to share their lists. Once they can do this, I think we're almost half way to users being able to share what is essentially a ToC for a seder tefillah or a collection of useful curricular resources...

3. Expanding listed excerpts of favorited posts to full posts. Currently, the plugin only shows excerpts of favorited posts. If the plugin had the option of presenting full posts, then the "Favorites List" can essentially become the penultimate step before rendering a selection of posts into a seder tefillah in print or PDF format.

I feel like this is doable for folks more familiar with JS and PHP hacking than I am currently. I'm a bit over my head in simply getting this plugin to work with jQuery's sortable function. (I put in some time this past week but I couldn't get it working yet.)

What do you think? Doable? I hope some folks on this list might be up for some plugin hacking and fulfilling a very very basic part of the Open Siddur vision. Let's do this!

Shavua tov!

Aharon

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Aharon Varady
Founding Director, shamesh
the Open Siddur Project
https://opensiddur.org

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Pronouns: He/him/his

[Aharon Varady]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 7:41 PM Aharon Varady <aha...@opensiddur.org> wrote:

 Currently the favorites list is only accessible from the web browser of the user.

Looks like I was wrong about this -- I just looked to see if I could access my favorites on opensiddur.org from another browser, once I'm logged in --- and yes I can! 

So perhaps implementing this feature ("Making lists accessible/shareable") will be easier than I thought. 

Aharon

 

[Marc Stober]

Hi Aharon,

It's an interesting idea.

For #1 - would the order get saved? I think to be useful it would have to be, but this would mean having to save this info back on the server. I haven't figured out where the plug-in stores data so I'm not sure how involved that would be.

For #2 - this is do-able, there are just a lot of specific questions about how it could be implemented. For example, does a user have to log in to share favorites or can they share "anonymous" favorites? Can a logged-in user have more than one list of favorites? Are all users' favorites shareable, or is there an option to make their list of favorites public? I could even see there being a post type of "anthology" or something which is a new type of Wordpress post, that is a sorted collection of other posts. (This is kind of beyond the core functionality of this plugin, but for that matter I wonder if there's might be another existing plugin that does something like this?)

For #3 - this sounds easy. Showing the excerpts appears to be an option of the [user_favorites] shortcode, so I could easily imagine a parallel option to show full text.

- Marc

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Marc Stober

Student Cantor/Jewish Educator | Software/Web Developer

marcs...@gmail.com | www.marcstober.com/fmv