DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not - but hey, at least it’s free!)

I have used a hack in the theme of my personal site for a while to obtain the “Verse of the Day” in the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) version. With things that I’ve learned about plug-ins, I decided to take a stab at creating a plug-in to do this work. That way, if I changed themes, I wouldn’t have to hack the new one they way I’ve hacked the current one.

The fruits of my labor is the new HCSB Verse of the Day plug-in for WordPress. It uses the reference from BibleGateway.com, then gets the text from their regular website. (They do not provide the service, citing copyright restrictions.) How to use the plug-in, along with my justification on copyright grounds, is in the top of the file’s comments. If they’re not clear, certainly post comments here and I’ll address them. (I do plan to submit the plug-in to WordPress.org - but, they require a specific README file format that it will take me a bit to put together.)

votd_hcsb.txt — HCSB Verse of the Day 1.0

To install it, download the file, rename it “votd_hcsb.php”, and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins directory. Then, enable it, and add the template tags to your theme - that’s it!

Version 2.3 of WordPress, the blogging software I use to produce this blog (as well as the other blogs on my site), will be released later today. I’ll be upgrading these blogs on Monday evening. There have been major pieces of WordPress that have been re-worked, and those are causing some plug-ins to not work correctly. None of my blogs are all that reliant on plug-ins - the “Share This” plug-in is the main one, and it’s been verified in 2.3 already.

There’s lots more information on the WordPress Development Blog - I won’t go into the details here. I’m confident this will be a smooth upgrade. I just wanted to let you know in case some things look strange, I’m on it.