Praized platform plugin: Movable Type Plugin Download
Download and Installation Instructions:
The zipped file contains two Praized plugins. The first one, “Praized Community”, will help you deploy your blog’s complete local search functionality (search, North American data and social tools). The second one, Praized Publishing Tool, will help you deploy the editorial tools to allow you to blog about places and tie everything back to your local search section. It will also help you create your Praized sidebar widget.
Minimum system requirements: Optimized for MT 4.1+. Also works with MT 3.2+ but requires more steps. Please contact us. Our plugins also currently require PHP5, though efforts are being made to achieve PHP4 compatibility for some features.
NB: The Praized Community plugin only work with dynamic publishing enabled i.e. you need to be able to use .php files with your install.
- Click on link to download the zipped file containing the two plugins
- Unzip the files. You should see two main folders called “praized-community” and “praized-tools”
- Copy the plugins (via FTP) to your Movable Type installation on your server in /plugins/ (see how to install Movable Type plugins, http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.2/11_advanced_topics/installing_plugins.html)
- Copy the mt-static folder (found with the Praized Community plugin) in /mt-static/plugins/praized-community
- Once that’s done, activate your plugins by going to Preferences-Plugins and clicking the enable link next to the two Praized plugins. You need to have admin privileges to access that section in the Movable Type back office.
- Click on Settings for the Praized Community plugin.
- You’re now on the Praized Community plugin settings page. The information in that page needs to be provided by Praized Media. Click on the “Request Keys” link.
- Fill-out the form to receive your API Key, Community Slug (will be based on your community name), OAuth Consumer Key and OAuth Consumer secret via e-mail. The API Key is needed to access our service. The Community Slug is the way we identify your community within the praized environment. Both OAuth keys are needed to allow users to sign-up to your community via our centralized sign-up process. OAuth is an open protocol to allow secure API authentication (http://oauth.net/)
- Once you’ve received your confirmation e-mail, enter the API Key, Community Slug, OAuth Consumer Key and OAuth Consumer secret in the appropriate fields
- Select your Praized trigger. The Praized trigger is the URL directory where you want your Praized community to be installed. For example, if you select /local, your local section’s home page will be yourdomain.com/local
- If you want a Google map in your place profile pages, you can generate a Google Maps API Key here (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html). Insert the resulting key in the appropriate field.
- Click on the Save Changes button
- Click on Praized Tools – Settings
- You’re now on the Praized Tools plugin settings page. You should already have the Community and API key. Enter them in the appropriate boxes.
- Click on the Save Changes button. If you’re using Movable Type 4+, the Praized search box and the Praized log-in link should now be installed. You’re now ready to become a place blogger!
- Go to your local search home page at http://www.yourdomain.com/places/ to see the vanilla installation. It should be empty at this point but will eventually display the top results from your community. To add places to this page, search for some of your favorite places using the Praized search box and Praized them (you might need to create a Praized user account by clicking on the Praized log-in link). By Praizing places, they automatically bubble up to your Praized community home page.
How to blog about a local place:
By adding the Praized Publishing Tool plugin, you’re now able to blog about local places by automatically inserting a snippet of place information directly within your blog posts. To use it, go to the Write Post page. To insert a place in your blog post, click on the Praized green logo. You can either embed a query or embed specific places.
To embed a query, search for something by filling out the “Look For” and “City” boxes and clicking “Go!”. Once you’re satisfied with the query, click on “Embed this query”. Select the number of places you want to embed (from 1 to 10) and if you want merchant addresses added. Click on done. Code is instantly generated in your future blog post.
To embed a specific place (or places), search for that place by filling out the “Look For” and “City” boxes and clicking “Go!”. Once you’ve found the place you were looking for (use the pagination system to navigate to other results, it might not be on the first page), click on “Embed this place!”. Code is instantly generated for that place and inserted in your future blog post. Do other searches if you want to blog about multiple places.
Best Practice:
Our experience shows that people usually blog about places to review them (ex: I just want to XYZ restaurant and it was good!), ask their readers for advice (ex: I’m looking for such a place in cityX) or to broadcast their location (ex: I’m currently attending ConferenceX at Moscone Center in San Francisco).
You should create a “local” tab in your blog that leads to the home page of your Praized community.