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WP Live Stream

49 Posted March 23, 2012 by Guru Frog Categories: Plugins

We think live-streaming events is one of the best things to come out of the web. It’s great to be working or watching TV and to have a live-stream of an event running. You’re up-to-date following the event, often from the other side of the world. Wouldn’t it be just AWESOME to have something like that on your WordPress website? You could live-blog an event, like the launch of the new iPhone! Or your panel at SXSW! Or your child’s birthday party…

Well, now you can. The industrious frogs down here, have coded up our first offered-to-the-public WordPress plugin, and it’s called WP Live Stream.

The WP Live Stream plugin provides a widget for posting updates into a Twitter-like stream on your WordPress website. It allows you to keep the updates separate from your blog content, and your Twitter timeline un-cluttered.

It’s dead simple to use, and we’ve made it highly configurable. It even has automagical real-time refresh. You post an update, and people following the event on your blog see the update refresh automatically. We’ve even built in support for short codes with configuration settings, so that you can place the widget on a WordPress page if you prefer.

Here’s a listing of the awesome features that we’ve built in to WP Live Stream:

  • Twitter Notification – Connect your Twitter account to WP Live Stream and send a tweet out with a link to your live stream when you start live blogging.
  • Clear & Archive – Clear your database of previous tweets or archive them.
  • Widgetized - Place your Live Stream anywhere on your blog that is widget-ready.
  • Shortcodes - Configure WP Live Stream on a dedicated page on your website.
  • Customize - Choose font colours, widths, background colours, update colours and much more.

And the BEST news? This plugin is free for everyone! Since it’s released under the GPL, you can use it free of charge on your personal or commercial blog.

Go. Get the plugin, and Live Stream something!

Comments

15/05/2012 9:37 pm
DonRaso

I liked it very much, but could you please explain how I could alter the maximum number of letters in one “post”? Say, I won´t have to limit myself to Twitters max.

Also, where do I find the “Twitter”-symbol, I would like to conceal it :)

Reply
18/05/2012 11:07 am
George

Hi Don…

Ambitious! We like it!

But what fun would it be if you got someone else to sky-dive, or bungi-jump FOR you, instead of doing it yourself?

This is one of those. The code is complex enough, so that you actually need to learn the skillz to pull it off. You have everything you need. The sources, the internet, and the wild-eyed ambition.

Spring Grasshopper, SPRING! Make us proud!

Reply
19/05/2012 12:07 am
DonRaso

Excellent reply, George! I actually did what you suggested and found out myself.

Adjusted the line:
echo str_replace(‘rel=”nofollow”‘, ‘rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”‘, make_clickable(substr(get_the_title(),0, 1000)));

(where 1000 substituted the 120).

And I felt so good finding out myself, and even better when reading your reply :)

I believe a famous quote puts it so well:
“Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime”

19/05/2012 11:14 am
George

Yay you! Well done! :)

18/05/2012 7:41 pm
joe

The widget works great updates in IE, Safari, and Firefox, but if you put it in a shortcode it does not update automaticly in IE. It updates in all other browsers using the shortcode though. You have to refresh the page in IE to get the update.

Reply
18/05/2012 8:04 pm
George

Which version of IE is that, Joe?

18/05/2012 10:13 pm
joe

testing it on IE v 8.0.7600.16385

19/05/2012 11:16 am
George

THanks Joe… We’ll have a look as soon as the devs are back in the office after the weekend. We let them out for a bit of a break every now and then :)

18/05/2012 7:54 pm
joe

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /var/www/html/henryqa/donbest_new/wp-includes/query.php on line 2746

This error shows up in the widget section. wp Version 3.3.2

Reply
18/05/2012 8:09 pm
George

And. From that path, it looks like you’re running that on a localhost? On a Linux machine? Or at least on a testing machine with funky domain stuff. But you’re browsing with IE, so VMWare?

18/05/2012 10:45 pm
joe

Yes its on a test server and vmware.

19/05/2012 11:20 am
George

Just a thought. Some Oauth type apps react badly to being hosted on non-live domains. That said, I’m sure I remember some MAMP local testing going well here at the pond, so maybe this is nothing, but thought I’d mention it.

26/05/2012 10:10 pm
Johan

Hi!

Tested it on my localhost. But when I press the submit-buttom nothing happens. It will probably work when I use it online :)

03/06/2012 4:44 pm
James

Just wondering if there’s any way to show all posts with a specific hash tag, as opposed to all posts by a certain user.

Thanks!

Reply
04/06/2012 4:45 pm
George

Hi James…

Um… Sorry, I don’t follow. Live-Stream posts are not RSS’d or fed from your blog, they’re posted by you. Your question is only valid in a context where the content is “fed” from outside. Which Live-Stream is not.

All good?

04/06/2012 4:58 pm
Chris M

@DonRaso – Well done! That’s an awesome change to the plugin, thank you for sharing and thanks George for motivating us to make our own changes :)

@James – it’s a cool idea and there are plugins that do that for Twitter feeds, but that’s not actually how Live-Stream works, so hash tags are never going to be a part of this.

Reply
13/06/2012 12:12 am
Alexander Trust

Is there a chance to show some scrollbars or to access the old entries? If people are live blogging and some users want to look at the things they missed, right now I don’t see an option they can do this.

Reply
13/06/2012 1:23 pm
George

Thanks Alexander, we’re chewing over that as an idea right now. We’ll keep you posted.

Reply
11/09/2012 5:24 pm

Hiya folks!

I love your live stream plug-in. I’m a non-techie, and I can tell you that it’s the only liveblogging plug-in on the WordPress platform that really works.

We used it at the iPad 3 announcement, and the only limitation was the Twitter-like limitation of characters. But I saw the fella above reveal how to hack that:

Adjusted the line:
echo str_replace(‘rel=”nofollow”‘, ‘rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”‘, make_clickable(substr(get_the_title(),0, 1000)));
(where 1000 substituted the 120).

Thing is, every time I go into the plug-in and try to make the same edit, when I go to update/save, I get this:

“Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.”

Is this something I’m doing wrong? It’d be great to get this tweaked, since tomorrow is the iPhone 5 event, and I’d love to be able to give our journalist covering the event more characters to work with. :-)

Thanks!

Reply
11/09/2012 5:57 pm
Rockstar Frog

Hi Mike

Thanks for the complement! Great to see it working wonders in the real world too!

Could you let me know how you are editing the plugin? Are you using the wordpress plugin editor perhaps? It is my experience that the editor can be quite limiting, not to forget that if you make a mistake and introduce PHP syntax errors (that means the coding is not written in the correct way) you risk the admin and the site from loading up at all (php errors will either show the error and stop doing anything, or even worse, you get that “Service Temporariliy Unavailable” error) so i don’t recommend that.

Another thing is, i can’t really tell if its the wordpress comment ill formatting your message, but make sure that line of code uses the single quote and double quote directly from your keyboard and not special styled quotes. PHP doesn’t understand non-standard quotes as we do.

Having said all this:
1. grab a working version of the plugin from wordpress
2. download the zip file
3. edit the file in the zip file and replace the substr(get_the_title(),0, 120) with get_the_title() (that means you wont be limited)
4. in wordpress admin install the plugin via the “upload” option and select your zipped version

11/09/2012 6:05 pm

Thanks for your reply. Ah yes, I was using the WordPress editor. Can I make the edits using my host’s webftp? I’m just not exactly sure which folder/directory the code is in.

24/09/2012 11:13 am
Annemie Van Attenhoven

Great plugin but I do not manag to put an image in the newsfeed. I do not have the icon of WP image to put it in. When I put the image-url he shows the link to the image.
Thanks a lot,

Annemie

Reply
25/09/2012 10:27 am
Rockstar Frog

Hi Annemie

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, always great to hear feedback and concerns of our tadpoles. There is an update on the way, so keep looking in your plugin section and upgrade to the latest version and all your worries will be gone.

Here’s the tech explanation: Basically, the issue is with a server setting of yours that doesn’t allow live stream to get the image size directly from an image not on your server, the new version works around this limitation.

Let me know if you have any other issues

10/10/2012 7:30 am
Anton

This is an excellent plugin! Thanks guys. Two questions: I installed the latest version, but when I try to go to the settings page I get the error “you are not authorized to view this” when I’m logged in with the admin username.

2. How can I configure the text of the update to be tweeted out aswell instead of the default “we have just updated our livestream…”

Thanks

Reply
10/10/2012 9:36 am
Rockstar Frog

Hi Anton

Are you using the 1.2.4 or 1.2.4.1 version? :) Upgrade to the 1.2.4.1 version should sort you out. As for the the tweeting out to your twitter account. The idea behind Live Stream’s current way is bring attention to your site and drive traffic from twitter to your sites Live Stream, why give all your traffic to twitter? But if this is something you prefer, and we definately will add it as an option in the next version so you won’t have to tweak it manually is in your plugins folder open the file /wp-live-stream/controller/stream.php. Search for the line that says “liveStream_update_social_networks” and change it to

liveStream_update_social_networks(stripslashes($_POST['livestream_update']),$_POST['networks']);

make sure that you enforce the 140 character limit twitter uses by setting the Character Limit setting to 140.

10/10/2012 12:01 pm
Anton

Thanks. I deleted the plugin and re installed and it’s working now.

I changed the code in stream.php and it works!

I will be using this plugin for big mountain biking event in South Africa starting next week for live updates. I understand that the goal is to drive traffic back to the website, but it’s going to get a bit spammy if we update the live stream every few minutes with “We have just updated…”. I’ve also added a #hashtag and link to the page where the live stream will feature.

Thanks once again.

Reply
07/11/2012 11:27 pm
Jorge

Hello George,
I am trying to upload a picture but I get this message “Upload error: 403″ . I haven’t any problems to upload images in normal posts, just with images associated to the plugin.
Thank you and congratulate you for the plugin!

Reply
08/11/2012 12:00 am
Jorge

I have just got to upload the pictures but they are not displayed.
I obtaing this message: “A TimThumb error has occured

The following error(s) occured:
Could not create the file cache directory.

Query String : src=http://jorgemestre.com/wp-content/uploads/nuevohorario.jpg&w=196
TimThumb version : 2.8.10″

Thank you in advance

Reply
08/11/2012 10:23 am
George

Have you tried browsing (via FTP) to the TimThumb cache folder? Does it exist? Can you create it? Can you set/change the permissions to 777? Does it work then?

Our plugin dev is on a couple of days break, Jorge. We’ll get him on it as soon as he’s back (this coming Monday).

28/11/2012 7:51 am
Nam

When I do [livestream width=400] to increase the width, the background doesn’t expand with it so it looks kind of weird. See image:
http://tradestream.indigoreality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/too-wide.png

Reply
28/11/2012 7:53 am
Nam

Setting notifications on for this reply

28/11/2012 10:16 am
Rockstar Frog

Hi There

Unless I can see the site I can’t really help much, but it seems to me the container that has the border has a fixed width in the CSS. Something that is telling it it is so much wide. The issue with this is that when we grow the livestream widget, it sets its own width, thus “overflowing” over the containing element.

In short, setting its parents width to “auto” should solve the issue, the “auto” property allows the container let what’s in it extend the width. and if you want it to have a minimum width for areas that the livestream is not in then you should set the min-width property to what the width was formerly.

Hope this helps

28/11/2012 10:20 am
Rockstar Frog

Finally found where your live stream is. You have defined a max-width in your style.css at line 2554. Remove that line and you’ll be sorted

28/11/2012 10:27 am
Nam

It worked! Thanks!

16/02/2013 5:10 am
amy

Thanks men you’ve done a great job that.

Reply
11/03/2013 3:45 am
Jura

Hi, I already installed the plugin. How do I have it run in my wordpress site?

Reply
15/03/2013 10:51 am
George

The installation and usage instructions start here,
as well as IN the plugin. So, if you’ve installed it, activate it, and navigate to it, and you’ll find the instructions right there!

13/03/2013 12:56 am
John

Hi, very nice plugin, thanks!

I’m getting the same error as a poster above about the TimThumb, I went and modified the permissions on cache to CHMOD 777 but no joy… Any ideas…?

P.S. cool site – a friend’s is – just thought I would share the froggy love.

RRRRiiiibbbiiiiitttt, John

Reply
15/03/2013 10:58 am
George

Haha! RRRRiiiibbbiiiiitttt to you too, John :)

Have you read all the comments on this post?
There’s a TON of options and good info to try there.

15/03/2013 11:01 am
John

Sry George – i didn’t even see that, I’ll implement this – I can already see why it might not be working… thx for the quick reply. J.

18/03/2013 2:28 am
TT

hi, got manual code to attach on html page for this plugin ?
on my wp widget section, the Live Stream widget can’t drag.

thanks.

Reply
04/04/2013 7:52 pm
Ifan

I’m having the same issue. The plugin breaks my website’s admin section. Widgets, visual composers, anything that’s usually draggable is not when this plugin is enabled.

Also, on the frontend I’m unable to resize the text area, so updates have to be inserted on a single line, which can be difficult for longer updates and html.

This is a great plugin, but unfortunately this issue makes it unusable for me. Would love to see a fix!

Reply
08/04/2013 10:57 pm
mike

I’ve just found this fantastic plugin, really like the email to stream feature, has anyone managed to resolve the widget dragging issue following the latest WordPress update?

29/04/2013 11:51 am
Rockstar Frog

Hi There

Update the plugin / download to version 1.2.4.4 and both your issues should be resolved. Happy streaming!

18/04/2013 11:05 am
Michael

I’ve just found this fantastic plugin and we really like all the features that this plugin offers, has anyone managed to resolve the issues following the latest WordPress update?

Reply
29/04/2013 11:43 am
Rockstar Frog

Hi There

We’ve just made the latest version available that addresses this issue. Feel free to download version 1.2.4.3.

29/04/2013 10:48 pm
Michael

Many Thanks Rockstar!

I will update the plugin and have a play!

06/05/2013 8:31 pm
Alexandria

well, call me “stupid” and slap me upside the head.
I can’t figure out how to get this to work at all.
Any simple instructions – besides empty dropdown boxes – for tech illiterates like me?

Reply
12/05/2013 5:52 pm
funky

thanks for the updated version

Reply

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