Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Feature of the week: Add publication lists to your WordPress Blog


WordPress is the most popular blog system in use on the web. Now we have established a convenient way to combine BibSonomy with WordPress.

With our new Plugin BibSonomy CSL you can add a list of publications from BibSonomy to your blog posts. You can style your bibliography with CSL Stylesheets (Citation Style Language). For this you can choose from a set of pre-installed styles, or you can choose a custom style from the web. Additional you have a possibility to add your BibSonomy Tag Cloud on your blog.

To install BibSonomy CSL, log into your WordPress installation as an administrator and search in the plugin install menu for BibSonomy CSL.



Install the BibSonomy CSL and BibSonomy Tag Cloud Widget in the install menu. (Alternatively you can download the plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bibsonomy-csl/, and unzip it and upload it by using a FTP client).

After the installation is complete, you will find in the settings menu the new item BibSonomy CSL. Click it and enter your BibSonomy user name and the BibSonomy API key. Save the settings.



Now you can create a new blog post or a new static page in the usual way. At the bottom you find a new Meta Box called Add BibSonomy Publications.
You can choose between user, group or viewable to select the content from BibSonomy. Detailed information about the scheme you can find at http://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/URL%20Scheme%20Semantics.



Ok, let's go through an example: Assume, you wanna publish your own publications in a blog post (and in BibSonomy all own publications are tagged with myown). Choose user as content source type and enter your BibSonomy user name as content type value. Now you have to filter your selection by using the tag myown. For this, enter myown in the input field for tags. If you want to select more than one tag you have to separate them by a space character. Optionally, you can limit the number of publications.

Now you can choose one of the pre-installed citation styles, to layout your publication list. If your desired CSL style isn't contained in the default selection, then you can select a custom style, by entering the url of the stylesheet. The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. A large list of free available styles can be found on http://www.zotero.org/styles/.

To manipulate the look and feel you can customize the CSS. An example is set by default. If you don't like it, simply delete it.



Save your post and take a preview. If it's necessary you can customize your settings or CSS definitions.

Warning: Be aware, that you are using your own account to retrieve the posts from BibSonomy. That means, that all posts, that are visible to you in BibSonomy (you private ones too), will be made visible on your blog, if they fit the description in the Meta Box. (In our example: all posts you have tagged with myown.)

Add a BibSonomy Tag Cloud

Adding a BibSonomy Tag Cloud in your blog is very easy. Switch to the Widget page using the Design menu item. Drag the BibSonomy Tag Cloud Widget to the prefered position, fill out the form, and choose a layout style. 



Save the settings and take a look at the front-end of the blog.


Happy tagging,
  Sebastian!