Gigya's WordPress plugin is a powerful addition to any WordPress blog or site, enabling a wide range of features that are fully configurable using the WordPress Administration Panels. Prominent features supported by the plugin include:
- Secure authentication (signup and login) of users for your WordPress blog or site. The plugin integrates fully with WordPress's user management system and keeps both WordPress and Gigya Socialize synched at all times.
- Send comments to Facebook profile feed.
- Invite your friends from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others to your blog's community.
- Update your status on social networks using a friendly status update widget.
- Fully configurable user interface design which can be controlled via WordPress's back-office.
- It's 100% free!
Installing the Socialize WordPress Plugin
Installing the Socialize WordPress plugin is quick and easy (takes about 15 minutes) and doesn't require any programming skills. Everything works out-of-the-box and the plugin is fully configurable through WordPress's Administration Panels.
Installation steps
- Download the Socialize WordPress plugin from here.
- Access your site’s server through an FTP application.
- Upload (copy) the plugin's unzipped folder to the
/wp-content/plugins folder.
- In your WordPress Administration Panels, click on Plugins, on the top menu.
- You should see your new plugin listed:
Note - If you don't see Gigya Socialize Plugin listed, try the following: check the "plugins" folder with your FTP program and see whether "gs-for-wordpress" is located there. If it is not, upload the files again. If it is, delete the files and upload them again.
- To turn the WordPress Plugin on, click Activate on the far right side of the list:
- The Administration Panels should now show the GS Plug-in as active:
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Configuring the Plugin
- Please open a user account on the Gigya website (click here to open an account).
- Access the Gigya Socialize Site Setup page and follow the steps described in the Socialize Setup Wiki page.
Make sure you enable status updates in Facebook, by checking the corresponding checkbox at the bottom of the "Configure Site Settings" page (please see the Socialize Setup page for a detailed explanation).
- Go to Settings>Gigya Socialize in your WordPress Administration Panels and enter your Gigya Socialize API Key and Gigya Socialize Secret Key (Base64-encoded) which can be found on the Gigya Site Setup page. Please also enter your Gigya Partner ID, which can be found in Gigya's site Account Settings page.
Additional Configuration Steps (Optional)
Adding a Sidebar Widget to your Blog
You can add a sidebar widget to your WordPress blog. The Sidebar Widget includes a login block, a status update text box and an invite friends button. To add the Sidebar Widget to your WordPress blog, go to your Administration Panels, click Appearance>Widgets and press the "Add" link next to the Gigya Socialize Login/Status Updates widget.
You may configure and edit the Sidebar Widget's texts and appearance according to your preferences:
Click the "Save Changes" button (at the bottom) when done.
Configuring the Design of Gigya Socialize Components
You can configure the look-and-feel of the Gigya Socialize components employedby the plugin.
First step - Go to the Components' Configuration pages on the Gigya website, pick the component you would like to configure (Login or Friend Selector) from the panel on the left-hand side, configure the component and copy the generated code.
For both the widget and main login configuration, you must enter the conf and login_params variables generated from the component designer. The following is an example of what you might put in the settings textarea. Note: Don't copy the entire code in the configuration page. Your code should look exactly like the example shown below.
var conf=
{
APIKey:'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE',
enabledProviders:'*'
};
var login_params=
{
height:400,
width:200,
containerID:'componentDiv',
UIConfig:'<config><body><captions background-color="#919148"></captions><texts color="#C876FF"></texts><background background-color="#FF6D6D" frame-color="#A4FFFF"></background></body></config>'
};
For the friend selector UI configuration, you must enter the entire line containing the ConfigUI parameter in the code obtained from the GUI designer. The following is an example.
UIConfig:'<config><body><texts><links color="#FF2424"></links></texts><controls><scrollingarrow color="#FF4020"></scrollingarrow></controls><background background-color="#76FFC8" frame-color="#FF60BF"></background></body></config>'
Then, go to your WordPress Administration Panel (in Settings>Gigya Socialize) and paste the copied code into the compatible text-area (see screenshot below) to apply your preferred configuration.
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Click the "Save Settings" button (at the bottom) when done.
