A Fresh Start

Now that I’ve written it, I’m sure other folk have written more accomplished versions. Still, here goes.

In conversation with young Miss Pickard (of Little Red Boat fame) the subject of blogrolls arose.

“Ooh,” I typed. “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a plugin that built a blogroll automatically from those who’d left comments on your site?”

Ignoring Anna’s less than enthusiastic response, I set to it and this is the result:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Em3 My Friends
Plugin URI: TBA
Description: A plugin that links to regular commentors
Author: Em3
Version: 0.01 pre-pre-beta
Author URI: http://a-fresh-start.a-blog.org/
*/

function show_friends($num=30,$minposts=5) {
global $wpdb;
$friends = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT comment_author_url, comment_author, count(comment_author) as number FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved='1' and comment_author_url <>” group by comment_author_url, comment_author order by number desc, comment_author LIMIT 0, $num”);
echo “<ul>”;
foreach ($friends as $line) {
if($line->number > $minposts) {
echo “<li><a href=\”".$line->comment_author_url.”\” title=\”".$line->number.” comments\”>”.$line->comment_author.”</a></li>”;
}
}
echo “</ul>”;
}
?>

As a default it’ll show the top 30 commenters ($num) who’ve left at least 5 comments ($minposts) if they’ve left a URL to link to. I have had to tidy up a few of my friends’ URLs to amalgamate slightly different spellings and cope with changes of domain name but that didn’t take long - a simple query in phpMyAdmin along the lines of:
UPDATE 'xxx_comments' SET comment_author_url = 'http://whatever.com' WHERE comment_author='Charlie'
does it in no time.

To use the plugin, do the old copy/paste/save in wp-content/plugins malarkey, activate it and call <php show_friends(); ?> in your sidebar.

For example, in my sidebar I now have:

<li><h2>My friends</h2>
<?php show_friends(); ?>
</li>

Enjoy.