Praized platform plugin: Wordpress 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: Wordpress 2.2 and above or Wordpress MU 1.3 and above. Our plugins also currently require PHP5, though efforts are being made to achieve PHP4 compatibility for some features.

  1. Click on link to download the zipped file containing the two plugins
  2. Unzip the files. You should see two main folders called “praized-community” and “praized-tools”
  3. Copy the plugin folder (via FTP) to your Wordpress installation on your server in /path_to_wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
  4. Once that’s done, activate your plugins by going to “Plugins” in the WordPress administration screen and clicking the activate link next to the two Praized plugins. You need to have admin privileges to access this section of the Wordpress back office.
  5. You should see a message box at the top of the page asking you to configure your plugins “Please take the time to configure the Praized plugin to take advantage of our tools”. Click on the first link.
  6. You’re now on the Praized Community plugin configuration page (should be called Praized Community Options). The information in that page needs to be provided by Praized Media. Click on the “Request Keys” link.
  7. 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/)
  8. 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
  9. Enter your Praized trigger. The Praized trigger is the URL directory where you want your Praized community to be installed, and that you registered with us during the API key request process. For example, if you enter ”/local”, your local section’s home page will be http://yourdomain.com/path_to_wordpress/local.
  10. If you want to take advantage of the built-in Google map integration, you can generate a Google Maps API Key here and insert the resulting key in the appropriate field.
  11. Click on the Save Config button
  12. Click on the other configuration link “Please take the time to “configure the Praized plugin”” to take advantage of our tools”
  13. You’re now on the Praized Tools plugin configuration page (should be called Praized Tools Options). You should already have the Community and API key. Enter them in the appropriate boxes.
  14. Click on the Save Config button. You’re now ready to become a place blogger!
  15. Enable the Praized Search Box. To display the Praized local search box in your blog sidebar, go to Design – Widgets in your Wordpress back office. Click on “Add” next to “Praized: Search Form” and click “Save Changes”. It’s now displayed in your blog (you might need to re-style the search block within your theme). Click on Edit to insert a title above the search box (you need to save to see the change). Click on Edit/Remove/Save changes to remove the search box.
  16. Enable the “Log-in to Praized” link. To display the log-in link in your sidebar, go to Design – Widgets in your Wordpress back office. Click on “Add” next to “Praized: Session” and click “Save Changes”. It’s now displayed in your blog. Click on Edit to insert a title above the search box (you need to save to see the change). Click on Edit/Remove/Save changes to remove the log-in link.
  17. 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.

Additional tool:

The Widget. To display the Praized widget in your blog sidebar, go to Design – Widgets in your Wordpress back office. Click on “Add” next to “Praized Tools”. Use the Praized searchlet to select the search results you want to display in your widget and click “Save Changes”. It’s now displayed in your blog. Make sure you insert a title above the widget to help users understand what’s in the widget (you need to save to see the change). Click on Edit/Remove/Save changes to remove the widget.

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 green Praized green. 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.

We also offer free hosted solutions.
Contact us for details