Chess By Blog is a plugin for WordPress 2.0 that adds graphical chess functionality to your WordPress blog. The plugin supports PGN (Portable Game Not …

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Chess By Blog is a plugin for WordPress 2.0 that adds graphical chess 
functionality to your WordPress blog. It lets you do several things:
<ul>
<li>PGN (Portable Game Notation) inserted into your post body will be 
displayed as a graphical board, inline in the browser. The client side 
code was written using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), resulting in 
Javascript (no Java required) that has been tested in Internet 
Explorer 6-9, Mozilla/Firefox, and Safari. The graphical look of 
the chessboard is controlled by themes, and can be easily controlled 
in the management panel for the plugin.</li>
<li>The board supports interactive play directly in the browser, in a 
mode which does not update the post body. All rules of chess are 
supported, include en passant, castling, and pawn promotion. This can 
be used to present chess problems for readers to work through.</li>
<li>Chess By Blog also supports a persistent game played between two 
players, hence the name of the plugin. Readers that have edit 
permissions on a post can take turns moving pieces, with the state of 
the board saving to the WordPress database between moves. The plugin 
uses WordPress and PHP security features to ensure that only moves 
that come from the client chessboard code can update the database.</li>
</ul>
Chess By Blog is free software, distributed under the Expat license (a 
copy of which is in chess-by-blog.php).
<h3>Usage</h3>
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:
<ul>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
</ul>
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.
<h3>PGN support</h3>
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.
<h3>Chess variant support</h3>
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 8×10 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.
<h3>Customization</h3>
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.
<h3>Building the client side code</h3>
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).
<h3>Known issues</h3>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Internet Explorer may have issues with the preview of new themes in 
the management panel.</li>
<li>There are some broken themes out there that will not work with this 
plugin. In particular, if the theme does not make a call to 
wp_footer() in footer.php, the Chess By Blog plugin will not be able 
to emit the necessary lines of HTML that invoke the Javascript 
code. (That theme may also break other plugins, and is definitely a 
theme bug.) You may be able to fix this by inserting the necessary 
wp_footer() call in the theme directory?s footer.php yourself ? try 
inserting:
at the beginning of the file.</li>
</ul>

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