WordPress.org

Usage

The plugin adds a "Chess By Blog" to the Quicktag panel that appears when you edit or write a new post. (Unfortunately, at this time there is no corresponding button in the visual editor.) Clicking the button will pop open a new window which allows you to create a new chess board. The fields of this board correspond almost directly to the seven required tags of Portable Game Notation. For the purposes of the plugin, all fields are optional; accepting the defaults will result in code inserted into your post which will create an empty, closed board. There are three types of boards that can be set up:

• Static, non playable board

  A static, non playable board can be created by leaving the "Wordpress ID" blank and by inserting algebraic move notation in the Movelist field. Note that for speed reasons, the input (particularly pawn moves) isn't fully error checked by the client code.

• Playable, non-persistent board

  An interactive, non-persistent board can be created by leaving the White and Black players at the default (i.e. "*"). Algebraic move notation can be optionally inserted in the move text to set up the board. Note that when the board is played interactively, full validation of each move is performed. This mode is ideal for presenting chess problems that can be worked through by readers.

• Playable, persistent board

  An interactive and persistent board can be created by selecting blog users for the White and Black players. These should correspond to the usernames of users of your blog who have at least Subscriber Roles.

Alternately, you can forego the usage of the Quicktags button and insert PGN directly, enclosed in "div class="CBB-board" tags. The client code will treat standard PGN as a static, non playable board. Playable boards can be created by inserting [CBBWhiteId] and [CBBBlackId] PGN tags with values as described above.

PGN support

Chess By Blog fully supports the seven standard PGN tags. Comments enclosed with curly braces are preserved, and will be shown at the top of the game log table when the corresponding move is highlighted. In addition, the FEN and JsCom (only the "startply" command is recognized) tags are both supported, allowing specification of the initial board layout. As an example of the JsCom tag, specifying [JsCom "startply 5"] will preposition the board after White's 3rd move.

Chess variant support

Chess By Blog fully supports FEN (Forsythe-Edwards Notation) via the "FEN" tag in PGN. This allows specification of the initial board layout. It also allows for handling of some chess variants.

Fischer Random Chess (or Chess960) is directly supported. The initial layout of the pieces must be specified via a FEN tag. Castling is supported correctly for this variant.

Capablanca chess is directly supported. The layout of the board must be specified via a FEN tag, using "A" or "a" for the Archbishop and "C" or "c" for the Chancellor; a 8x10 piece layout must be specified as well.

There is limited support for arbitrary board sizes. Castling is handled by always moving the King to the 'c' file if castling on the a side, or the file to the left of the rightmost file if castling on the other side; the Rook is always moved to the inner square. This supports Fischer Random Chess and Capablanca Random Chess, but does not support other variants. In addition, en passant always assumes the pawns start on the 3rd rank.

Customization

The look of the client side code is controlled by themes, which live under chess-by-blog/themes. A new theme can be created by adding a subdirectory which contains at least a file named "ChessByBlog.css". This style sheet should contain the same classes as shown in the default theme. In addition, there is a requirement that the CBB-square and CBB-button contain width, height, and min-height attributes with explicit pixel sizes. The client side code needs these in order to correctly infer the sizes of chessboard squares and buttons.

Building the client side code

This step is optional, but if you need to make fundamental changes to the code that can't covered by changes to CSS, you'll need to edit the Java source files in src/org/levork/gwt.

The client side code is Javascript which lives in the chess-by-blog subdirectory, compiled from Java using the Google Web Toolkit. To build this yourself, you will need to have the Google Web Toolkit installed (at least version 1.7), after which the entire src directory can be copied into your Google Web Toolkit folder. It is then recommended that you run

webAppCreator -ignore org.levork.gwt.client.ChessByBlog

This will create the build.xml script necessary to compile using ant. Running 'ant build' will compile the project into the subdirectory war/chessbyblog. The files with cache in their name are the Javascript files; these go in wp-content/plugins/chess-by-blog (and the old ones should be deleted, most of them will have different names).

Known issues

• Switching from the code to visual editor may wreak havoc on the div tags, despite the tags being protected by pre tags. This is an issue with the visual editor.
• Internet Explorer may have issues with the preview of new themes in the management panel.