HOWTO: Add a Live Forum Roll to Your Wordpress Blog

Over at Tangler we are busy finding ways for live discussions to reside where the users want them to. For example, if you have a  blog post that would benefit from swarming readers into a live discussion, you can now do that using the new ‘Share’ tool to embed the topic in your blog post.

Taking this idea further, we are slowly revealing the Tangler API and this is something of a sneak peak.

Itching to give it a go, I have added a dynamic list of all my live forums to this blog’s sidebar and giving you what you need to try the same.

Instructions 

If you haven’t done so already, get yourself an account on Tangler.

Download WP Tangler Live Discussion Roll and unpack it into the root of your current WP theme.

Edit tangler-sidebar.php at the top to your user-id and to the number of forums you would like to display.

Get your user-id by viewing your profile in Tangler and looking at the URL which will be http://www.tangler.com/people/id/12324. Grab the number off the end.

// Widget settings
$user_id = 1454; // Your id
$top = 20; // The number of forums you wanna display

In your template somewhere (mine is in sidebar template) I have then added the following:

<h5>Live Forum Roll (<a href="http://www.tangler.com">Tangler Power</a>)</h5>
<ul>
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH."/tangler-sidebar.php");?>
</ul>

That’s all there is to it. It’s a quick and dirty hack but it gets the job done. Next task is to turn this into a WP Plug-in.
API Methods Available Today

If you want to do more, feel free to explore the first three methods released and let me know how you go.

Example: Get a User’s Public Forums

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/user/1454/forums/

Example: Get a Forum’s Topics

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/forum/20801/topics/

Example: Get a Topic’s Messages

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/topic/34074/

Have fun!

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