Remember those web forums?
The big thing before everybody became a blogger..
Well, personally I'm still using them a lot. Of course, my signature includes a link to my blog. I bet that most of you also have their blog linked in a forum signature - "Visit my great blog".
Yeah, great catch phrase.. but no matter how great your link-text is, people will get used to it. As soon as they are used to your link they won't click it anymore - so what to do? Try out a new catch phrase every week?
What about this: Apart from the default link to your blog you could also give them a link to your most recent entry - together with it's title, category, publishing date, comment count..
And you don't have to do anything, even with multiple forums.
bbSigPress automatically updates your signatures when you publish a new post.
Warning: This plugin is still in a very early beta state! It mostly works, but problems may occur! Use with caution!
Multiple Forums
You can define as many forums to be updated in the settings as you want!
Please be aware that bbSigPress does basically the same as you would do - so it may take some seconds per forum.
You simply need to enter your login details, the URL to the forum and its' type - and of course the signature.
Templates
bbSigPress not only put's a boring link in your signature - you still have full control over the layout!
Just design and style your signature in the forum of your choice and afterwards copy the "BB-Code" to the template field of that forum.
Then put in the placeholders you want to use and you're done! You can use the following placeholders:
- %title% - obviously, the post's title.
- %author% - the display-name of the author.
- %permalink% - explanation needed?!
- %category% - also works if post is in multiple categories!
- %date% - is formatted using your WP settings.
- %time% - likewise.
- %commentcount% - the bigger, the better, right? ;)
Supported forum software
Although you may have thought so: bSigPress ain't a magician. There are probably hundreds of different bulletin board systems (BBS) out there.
And for each one of them I need to manually define how to update the signature in this particular system. If you wan't to learn more about it, read
here and
there.
Two big players are "vBulletin" and "Burning Board" and most of you should have seen a phpBB, as it is free. Currently the following BBS are supported:
- vBulletin 3
- Burning Board 2
- phpBB 3
More to come soon! Please visit the
support forum if you need help with a specific BBS!
- Unzip and upload the "bbSigPress" directory into "wp-content/plugins/"
- Activate it on your plugin management page.
- Setup your accounts under the new "bbSigPress" option of the settings menu
- That's it, you're done!
Update
- Override the "bbSigPress" directory in "wp-content/plugins/"
Update from within Wordpress Admin Panel of course also works.