[Ricardo]

Ricardo

#1546

I have thought long and hard about this one, but I think this will really add something to the theme.

I want visitors to be able to login with their Twitter or Facebook account to leave a reply.

I know you can install the simple Twitter and Simple Facebook connect plugins, but they have a lot of features I (and maybe other people) don’t want (or need), and you are adding 2 extra plugins to your site which means slowing it down. Maybe WordPress will release a plugin for this, but this has never been confirmed.

I don’t now how hard this is to implement and if this is even possible Syahir?

[Kenneth John Odle]

Kenneth John Odle

#16195

Yes, this would be cool. Very cool. It is already available for wordpress.com blogs, so it might be something we want to address with wordpress, rather than through the theme. I don’t know why this isn’t available for wordpress.org blogs, since I haven’t had time to check those forums.

Although if this were the only theme that made this available, a lot of people would probably use this theme just for that reason.

On the other hand, I allow anyone to leave comments, without registering, but I do moderate comments and also use Akismet to prevent spam.

Ken

[Ricardo]

Ricardo

#16196

They don’t make this clear (why it isn’t available for self hosted sites). They have only said that it maybe could be added to the Jetpack plugin in the future.

And if people would spam using their Twitter/Facebook account, maybe there is a way to just blacklist that account.

It also improves the loading time of the site by having it implemented in the theme itself instead of having an extra plugin. I also think this would attract extra people to the theme.

[Kenneth John Odle]

Kenneth John Odle

#16197

It also improves the loading time of the site by having it implemented in the theme itself instead of having an extra plugin. I also think this would attract extra people to the theme.

Good point.

[mangee]

mangee

#16198

I also think it will be so cool to have this in the theme. I think a sizeable number of people would rather just leave a comment with their facebook account than enter their details all over again just to leave a comment.

Moreover for me, over 40% of my traffic at the moment come from facebook links. it will just be convenient for them to comment using their facebook identities.

If this were to be implemented in the theme, it will just be awesome!

[Kenneth John Odle]

Kenneth John Odle

#16199

I think a sizeable number of people would rather just leave a comment with their facebook account than enter their details all over again just to leave a comment.

I think you’re right on this. Like it or not, Facebook is with us to stay, at least for the next few years. (Or at least until Facebook gets “Myspaced”!)

Ken

[Syahir Hakim]

Syahir Hakim

#16200

A theme is probably not an appropriate place to implement this function. As the general philosophy in the core WordPress developers community goes, a theme should only be concerned with the presentation of a site, and not it’s functions. Though of course, there can be severe gray areas when defining which is which.

So unfortunately, this feature will probably not be implemented in the theme. Like you said, there’s already plugins that can achieve this, so implementing it in the theme will be sort of like reinventing the wheel all over again.

I understand your reluctance to use plugins due to performance issues associated with all the other features that you don’t need, but that should not deter you from using plugins at all. Instead, you should carefully consider the feature/performance trade-off and decide whether or not the feature is worth the performance hit.

[mangee]

mangee

#16201

“(Or at least until Facebook gets “Myspaced”!”

That’s so funny 😀

“As the general philosophy in the core WordPress developers community goes, a theme should only be concerned with the presentation of a site, and not it’s functions. Though of course, there can be severe gray areas when defining which is which.”

Syahir, I think a very valid argument can be made that this feature is still in keeping with “presentation” of sites. With over 750 million users facebook is an ubiquitous channel that sites should strive to “present” themselves to. I think why many of graphene theme users like this theme is that it reduces the need to use plugins to achieve some functions. For instance, one feature I was looking for while hunting for a theme was a “slider”. I found that there are many plugins that could do this with any theme. But graphene theme offers this natively. So I don’t need a plugin to achieve that functionality on my site. And I am very happy about that.

Also on the plugins, I tried installing Simple Facebook Connect plugin by Otto(who it appears is a very influential wordpress personality). It offers over 15 facebook functions (most of which i don’t need or want). I only wanted to use it to show “like” button for my articles and also help publish my articles to my facebook fan page. I had made my own “facebook fan page like” widget but I guessed it must have conflicted with the plugin so it stopped showing. I had installed the code directly in a widget on my site. The “fan page like” widget the plugin offered me wasn’t very aesthetically pleasant to me. I guess maybe that might be my own fault. A CSS styling or something like that might have remedied that. But unfortunately I don’t know any programming coding.

The only other facebook function I think I want right now is for people to comment using their facebook identities. But I am scared of installing any plugin to achieve that because it may conflict with the facebook generated codes I have already installed. Hence the argument for a native theme facebook functionality.

Whatever your decision, I still think graphene theme rocks. 🙂

[dave]

dave

#16202

I am not sure if the functionality needs to be inside the theme, but maybe we could share the website names of Graphene sites that have implemented advanced “socialization”. We can then keep a thread of the techniques those people used to make it easier for the rest of us with limited coding experience. I can do a lot if someone holds my hand through changes to my child function.php, but usually can’t come up with the code myself.

I started to read the facebook connect/open graph instructions on facebook’s site and my eyes glazed over. The coding and even how it all works seems very complicated to me. I tried installing SFC 1.0, and that is ok, but I would probably rather have it customized more to the look and feel of Graphene.

Where I want to end up:

In the top bar have the following:

Tweet this icon to tweet about the home page

A google plus one button (initially without the count) for the home page

Facebook Like button (initially without the count) that will like the home page

Pictures of all the viewers facebook friends that like the site

Maybe the viewer’s fb avatar with the “Hi Dave,” stuff like tripadvisor.com has.

Have all the icons look good together like the current ones do.

For each post

Tweet this icon to tweet about the post

A google plus one button (initially without the count) for the post page

Facebook Like button (initially without the count) that will like and share the post

Pictures of all the viewers facebook friends that like the post

Also, I have thirty something likes on facebook.com/FreeTravelGenius and want to someone carry those over, though I hear that may not be possible. Maybe when I’m done I send some type of message that that page is transitioning over and please click this like button instead.

My site, btw: http://freetravelgenius.com