How to use the Fav Me plugin

Using the Plugin

We leave the no-brainer part to learn something interesting now: how to implement the plugin in your theme.
Basically all you need are 2 functions:

  1. mfp_the_link();
  2. mfp_display();

mfp_the_link will display an “Add this post to your favorite post list” link wherever you call it. Best practice of course is to add the function anywhere INSIDE your WordPress loop. That will create the add link for each post.

You can pass up to two parameters when calling mfp_the_link().
These are: add_link and remove_link.
The syntax is euqal to many wordpress core functions:

mfp_the_link("add_link=add me please&remove_link=remove me please");

This will replace the default link names with the ones you provide. If you want you can add markup as well:

mfp_the_link("add_link=<span class='add_this'>add me please</span>");

mfp_display will display the list of favorite posts anywhere you like. No WordPress loop required here.
So you can put the list in your sidebar, footer, main content area etc.

Of course you can pass parameters here as well. Calling the function without parameters will create an unordered list: each list item will contain a link to the post and a “remove link”.
The default classes added are:

  • ul class: mfp_favorites
  • link class: mfp_link
  • remove link class: mfp_remove_link

So you don’t like my classes? Or you want to display the items in <div> and <p> instead of <ul> and <li>?
Here are the parameters you may change:

  • title : Default is no title
  • display : Default is “list” -> you may change it to “div”
  • remove_link : Text for remove link, Default is “remove”
  • class : Class for ul/div , defaul is “mfp_favorites”
  • link_class : Class for the post link, default is “mfp_link”
  • remove_link_class : Class for remove link, default is “mfp_remove_link”
  • order_by : Order of items, default is ID, you can change that to any field name of the wp_posts table: some examples would be “post_title”, “post_author”, “post_date”. Get the full list at the WordPress Codex.

Some examples:

// Add a h3 title
mfp_display("title=<h3>Favorite Posts</h3>")

// Display as Div with different class names
mfp_display("display=div&class=class_1&link_class=class_2");

// Order by post Title & different remove link text
mfp_display("order_by=post_title&remove_link=up up and away");

Another option is to pass the ID of a user to the function. This way it will display another users favorite post list. you can do that by apending the ID as a seperate parameter. The following example would retrieve the posts of user 13 from the database:

mfp_display("order_by=post_title",13);

One of the best options to use this function would be to show it on the authors page of a user. Just insert the ID of the user dynamically ;)

Another option to display the posts is through the widget added in version 1.2.

Thats it. If you encounter any problems, please tell me via contact form or comments. I would also be glad to hear suggestions for improvements, be it in functionality, usability or code wise.

Have a nice day ;)

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