Emmanuel Georjon

As a lot of WordPress users, I also use the bookmarker Delicious. Both of the tools are efficient to manage links, but we have to decide if we want to manage our links in the both tools, or use each of these tools differently. If we choose the first case, we have to enter the links twice.
Some plugins allow to display the Delicious links in our blog, but most of them just read RSS feeds coming from Delicious. This method has two disadvantages: we can get only the last updated or added bookmarks, and it can slow down the blog.
EG-Delicious-Sync allow to backup the Delicious links into WordPress links database. You can then use these links as usual, with the WordPress features (widgets, templates tags …).

Description

Most of plugins related to Delicious allow to display Delicious links, or synchronize the last links. They use RSS features of Delicious, with three main disadvantages:

• They can adress only the last updated or added links,
• Use RSS, even with a cache, can slow down your blog,
• Links are not stored permanently in the WordPress database.

EG-Delicious-Sync use the HTTP API of Delicious, and allows to perform a true full backup of your Delicious links, into the WordPress database, in the standard table (wp_links). So, after this synchronization, you can use the standard features of WordPress to manage and display these links (widgets, template tags …), as if the Delicious posts are local.

You can customize the backup (or synchronization) with a number of options:

• You can entirely control the links classification, by assigning the WordPress categories of links, with the Delicious bundles, or the Delicious tags,
• You can specify if you want a single categories per link, or allow several categories,
• Specify if you want to keep the links already existing in the WordPress databases

The plugin provides also:

• Display Delicious network badge (widgets, or template tags),
• Display Tagsroll,
• An enhanced blogroll widget,
• Synchronization of tags between WordPress, and Delicious,
• A full backup of the Delicious database (same format than the export/import functions of Delicious).

Installation

Requirements

EG-Delicious-Sync requires with WordPress 2.6 and later, and PHP 4.3 and later.

Installation

• The plugin is available for download in the WordPress plugins repository,
• Once downloaded, uncompress the file eg-delicious-wp-sync.zip,
• Copy or upload the uncompressed files in the directory wp-content/plugins in your WordPress platform,
• Activate the plugin, in the administration interface, through the menu Plugins.

The plugin is now ready to be used.
You can also use the WordPress 2.7/2.8 features, and install the plugin directly from the WordPress interface.

Then you can go to menu Settings / EG-Delicious to set plugin parameters

Configuration

1. The configuration panel is available in the Settings / EG-Delicious menu,
2. First, you have to give your Delicious username, and password. These parameters will allow the plugin to query Delicious API, to get posts list, tags list …

   

3. After you press Save changes, a new form appears, with synchronization parameters,

   

4. The mandatory parameters are the assignemnts between WordPress categories of links, and Delicious bundles or tags. If the plugin cannot find the right categories, links won’t be synchronized,

   

5. Once you fill the assignments table, click on « Save changes »,

   

6. Options are saved, and you are ready to lanch your first synchronisation session.

Synchronize

1. To synchronize the Delicious and WordPress links databases, use the menu Links / Delicious Sync.,
2. Click on the start synchronization button,
3. The plugin sends requests to Delicious and WordPress to collect links, tags, and bundles, and build synchronization table,
4. When the calculation is terminated, the plugin displays this synchronization table. You can choose the categories, and the action to operate on each link,
5. When you click on the Update changes button, the plugin proceed with all links when the action, and categories fields are not empty,
6. The session is terminated, when you synchronize all links, or when you press the Stop synchronization button.

Tags Synchronization

The plugin can import the Delicious tags into the WordPress database. This feature allows you, for example, to standardize your classification between the two platforms. You can access to the tags synchronization through the menu Posts / EG-Delicious Tags.

The plugin displays the two lists, and the recommended actions. You can confirm this action, or change it, for each tag. After the validation, the plugin will execute all the operations requested.

Backup

If you don’t want to synchronize your bookmarks, but easily trigger a backup of the Delicious Database, you can use the menu Tools / Backup Delicious. With this menu, you can launch backups of Delicious, keep these backups, delete or dowload them.

Automatic post publication

Delicious displays, for each link, the number of members who bookmark it. This number can be consider as a good indicator of popularity. But adding all your posts into Delicious can be boring.

EG-Delicious-Sync can automatically add into Delicious, the posts you publish in WordPress. When you click on the Publish button, your post is immediately added to Delicious.

You can enable this function, by unsing the menu Settings / EG-Delicious. In this menu, you can:

• Enable, or disable the publication mecanism,
• Choose the tags to use during publication.

Please note that posts are also automatically suppressed from Delicious, when you delete them from WordPress.

Widgets

EG-Delicious add three widgets:

• an enhanced blogroll,
• a summary of your Delicious account (number of links, …). This summary is called NetWork Badge,
• the list of Delicious tags, as tags cloud, or as simple list.

All of these three widgets share some common parameters: you can choose the display conditions. You can choose type of page (home, post, page, category …), or the language (useful if you manage a multilangual blog).

In detail:

• EG-Delicious BlogRoll widgetdisplays the list of links, as do the standard blogroll widget, but with more parameters. You can choose:
  • to display list in one or two columns,
  • the maximum number of links to display,
  • one or more categories.
• Network badge widget displays the NetWork Badge of your Delicious account. The widget shows the main information of your Delicious account (number of links, number of fans, …). You can choose to display or hide each field of the account.
• Delicious tags widget displays the Delicious tags, as a tags cloud, or as a list. This widget can be useful if you don’t want to display your blogroll directly on your blog. With this widget, you just give a set of links to show your bookmarks. Can be interesting, if you have a huge bookmarks database.

Frequently Asked Questions

The plugin backups of Delicious links into the WordPress links database. To have a true synchronization, can we update the Delicious database with the WordPress links?
No, for the moment, because of constraints of the Delicious API:

• This API allows us to create a link in Delicious database, but we cannot launch a big amount of requests at the same time, because of Delicious securization.
• With this API, we cannot update a link. We just can delete and re-create it, but in this case, the date is wrong.

After a synchronization, a link appears several times in the list.

The EG-Delicious-Sync plugin uses the field « url » to compare the Delicious and WordPress links. Two links with the same name, but two different url, are two different links, from the plugin point of view.

Is it possible to have a dual-way tags synchronisation?

Unfortunately no. The Delicious API doesn’t include a command to create tags.

The Delicious backup feature can only be used in manual mode. It is possible to schedule it?

This feature is planned in a next version.