About
The CRE is a WordPress plugin which activates both Scripture references and references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, showing non-intrusive popups when you mouseover them.
Example
Jesus builds his church: Matthew 16:16-18. One holy, catholic and apostolic Church: CCC 748,750. The ark of the New Covenant: Revelations 11:19; 12:1-2.
FAQ
Why does the CRE show the passages without formatting, and not as nicely formatted popups like I see in the examples?
Please download the CRE from this page (see below).
For some reason, an incomplete package for the CRE is being circulated, and I don’t know why or where it is coming from, but it is missing critical components of the CRE (the Javascript and CSS). Installing such a broken package will give you a non-functional CRE!
It is likely that the WordPress “auto-install” feature will give you a broken CRE, so do not use auto-install to install the CRE.
Download
WordPress Plugin
Version 0.8.16 released 2009-10-26.
- Version 0.8.16, without texts zip 30kb | tar.bz2 27kb
- Version 0.8.16, with texts zip 2099kb | tar.bz2 1417 kb
Texts
The CRE needs the texts in order to do its work. If you did not obtain the full package (above), then download these texts and unpack them in your catholic-reference/ plugin directory. They will be stored under catholic-reference/texts/.
Usage
| Type this | See this |
|---|---|
| !John 3:16 | John 3:16 |
| !CCC 1843 | CCC 1843 |
| `!Matt. 28:20 | `Matt. 28:20 |
| `!CCC 987 | `CCC 987 |
| !!Isa. 60:53-20 | !Isa. 60:53-20 |
| !!CCC 740-750 | !CCC 740-750 |
| [nocathref] No references activated: !CCC 860-862 !Sirach 2:1 | No references activated: !CCC 860-862 !Sirach 2:1 |
Sites Using the CRE
Blog Hosts
Blogs
- Acts Seventeen
- AgustinongPinoy
- angfrayle
- Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church
- Basic Missions
- Bible Lotion
- Biblia y Catecismo
- The Bible Workshop
- Blessed Sacrament Parish
- Bombastic
- Brian McDaniel on Strategic Communications
- Brian Wiese
- Called to Communion
- Caritas Christi Urget Nos
- Catechist Corner
- Catholic Bible In A Year
- Catholic Revelation
- Catholic Scotland
- Catholic Truths
- Christina Cox Art Blog
- The Catholic Student Center at West Texas A&M University
- Catholicism Computes
- Cathopologist
- Catolico Cerrado
- Cincinnati Seminarian Blog
- Claves Regni Caelorum
- Clonlost Retreat Centre
- Diocese of Middlesbrough
- Family for Kids
- Father Allen’s Site
- Five-Stick Day
- Footsteps of Saint Paul
- fruitful faith
- A Gift of Tongues
- G. M. Knowles
- God Left a Message
- Golden Arrow
- Half the Kingdom
- Healing After Abortion
- Hearing God’s Call
- Holy Postage
- Javier Plumey
- JD Lozinger
- Kursilyo
- Lengua Latina
- Life Around the Collar
- Living Gracefully
- Mabuting Balita
- Machina Dei
- The Master’s Habit
- Matthijs Meeuwsen
- The McCaul Retort
- Medjugorje.org
- Middlesbrough Diocesan Vocations
- My Little Voice of Worship
- My Online Chapel
- Option C
- Ora et Labora
- Papist and Patriot
- The Recovering Choir Director
- Ruri et Orbi
- RyanClan.us
- Sacred Devotion
- Seas Respect Life
- St. Clare of Assisi Parish
- Tiny Calico Cat
- Transitus Tiber
- Universal Fellowship In Christ
- The Upper Pontiac Parishes
- Visibly Catholic
- Viva Catholic!
- Your Daily Inspiration
- 2 Seconds Faster
Any chance of making something like this for Blogger? I would be indebted to you for the rest of my life.
phatcatholic: Thank you for stopping by! I have called it the “Catholic Reference Extension” (as opposed to the “Catholic Reference Plugin” for WordPress) because I intended from the start to port it to as many blogging platforms as I can muster. Indeed, Blogger seems to be a very popular blogging service for Catholic bloggers, so I would be wiping out a large section of my target audience if I were not to make a Blogger plugin.
Truth be told, however, I will have to approach this with some determination, because from what I have learned so far, Blogger plugins are entirely Javascript-based. That makes it somewhat more challenging — though not impossible.
I want to concentrate first on stabilizing the WordPress version of the CRE, then I will decide on the next platform based on popularity.
By the way, how did you find this? I haven’t publicized this plugin at all.
It’s still in the early testing stages, and I want to ensure it’s a solid product before spreading the word about it.
I’ve done some further investigation, and it doesn’t look promising. There are two approaches that I see:
Webservice. This would entail me putting up some sort of public AJAX service which would serve the scripture and CCC passages. That means I would shoulder the service burden for every single page view of every blog that uses the CRE on it. This might work in the short term, but that would never scale, at least not without some monetary expenditure on my part.
Local software. If a blogger.com user wishes to use the CRE with their blog, they’ll have to download and install some software (which I’d write). This software will remotely interact with the blog (via the API that Google provides) and modify the post text to “activate” the Scripture and CCC references. Downside of this approach: Annoyance factor of having to install software and use it to update the posts in a process distinct from the actual posting on the blog.
So, if you think option 2 is acceptable to you, I might consider programming something to that effect, but I don’t see that getting popular.
Blogger.com may be alright for basic blogging, but it is a limited platform when compared to things like Moveable Type and WordPress, which are controlled server side. In contrast, you have no control over the blog software that is run at blogger.com. Obviously, I don’t anticipate too many people will change blogging platforms for the sake of a single extension.
Your thoughts?
It may be worth mentioning, though, that WordPress seems to have Import capabilities for Blogger and LiveJournal (among others). I’ve never used this feature, but you might consider exploring this avenue.
What is the default bible translation? NAB?
Nate: At the moment, it is the Douay-Rheims. I’m not married to that, though. At the same time, I’m trying to respect copyright and generally play nice.
Hoo-rah! I’m currently at Blogger, but my husband is using WordPress. This is a great resources. Thanks so much. Congrats on making wordpress.org.
Praise be to God!
What’s your husband’s blog?
This is a great plugin. We are going to start using it on our show’s site and a new site we are building. I’ll keep you posted! Keep up the great work. Once I have had a chance to play with it I will leave more comments.
A couple of features for future releases: - Links to paragraphs within encyclicals and apostolic letters - Google Map integration for locations within Bible versus
Hi, Javier. Thanks for stopping by, and for your comments. I’d love to be kept informed about how things go with it. Don’t hesitate to ask for help or new features.
Your two suggestions are interesting! I’ll give them some thought.
God bless!
This is very cool. I’m going to use this plugin for a Catholic blog that I am developing.
Any chance of a NSRV version?
God bless,
Scott
PS: You’ve been Stumbled! so you should see a bit of an increase in traffic.
Thanks for stopping by. Let me know how it goes with your new blog. I can definitely supplement the core texts with any legally available translations. Get your blog going, then we can talk more about that.
Thank you very much for the Stumbleupon thumb up, I appreciate it.
[...] for styling the results through CSS and through the options panel for the plugin. The author, from Catholicism Computes, has provided references for other publicly available bible translations including the NAB, [...]
Wonderful plugin! I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.
I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to standards compliance, so I (actually, my HTML Tidy Firefox plugin) noticed a couple of things that could be addressed regarding this:
Replacing & with & in the query strings (I was able to do this without a hitch.)
Replacing the proprietary closeid, refid, popid tags with something standards-based. (I understand why these are there, but don’t know what to do to make these things compliant.)
Replacing the deprecated ‘target’ attribute.
Something a bit more problematic that needs to be addressed in the code is the discrepancy in the numbering of Psalms in the Vulgate/Douay versus the other translations.
Also, it would be great if one window can be generated for citations of Scripture that span more than one chapter (for example, “Philippians 3:17-21; 4:1-3″). Currently, the code doesn’t recognize the semicolon in the example citation.
That said, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for…and it has a lot of potential!
Hi, Aristotle. Thanks for checking out the plugin, and for your comments.
I will change & to &.
This could be done with some ugly hackery and embedding of the data, but I think using proprietary tags makes the code cleaner and simpler. I will ponder some possible options.
I will put in an admin option that lets you choose whether to use a target attribute or not on the anchors. See also “Standards-Compliant New Windows” for a Javascript-free way to have compliant pages that also use target attributes.
I will see about an option that would try to compensate for the Psalm numbering difference (which I was aware of).
I’ll look into the semicolon-separated listings. As we know, it is a popular convention.
Thanks for the prompt response. I’ve just incorporated the plugin onto my blog.
I see two corrections to the code that need to be made at this point:
One more idea:
I know a fair number of Catholic bloggers (especially those who are liturgically inclined) who like to proof-text documents of Vatican II as well as papal writings; is the current architecture capable of incorporating these additions in future releases? I would even be willing to edit these documents into an appropriate format if desired.
Aristotle: Thanks for testing it out, and thanks for your quick and pointed feedback. It is both helpful and appreciated.
I have made the two changes, and am testing them out on my own blog before making another release.
The CRE design is such that it would not be too great a stretch to do the same thing with other documents and sources. Indeed, you’re not the first to ask for something like this. Your offer to edit the documents is also most appreciated! Be careful, as I may just take you up on that.
Which documents do you think would be most desirable to start with? And who might these other Catholic bloggers be? I should point out that, at present, the CRE only works with personally-hosted WordPress installations. WordPress blogs hosted at wordpress.com, as well as blogs running other software (MoveableType, TypePad, Blogger, etc.) are not supported at this time.
I know that there have been people that have shared their reflections on the Vatican II documents, as well as other writings.
Perhaps these texts could be downloaded a la carte, or prepared as demanded.
Kindly send me a personal e-mail; I’ll give you the couple of sites I’m aware of off-thread.
I’ve also done some work on the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and have a couple of questions that I’d like you to address.
Thanks so much!
“Which documents do you think would be most desirable to start with?”
Summa Theologica?
Aristotle, Scott: I was thinking that I would like to begin with documents that people already have referenced numerous times in their blogs, so we could see it in action right away.
Aristotle: I will contact you by e-mail.
I plan on taking a more mystical approach to my blog, so I was only 1/2 joking about the St. T of A reference.
I agree that the Catechism would be a good addition, and the full text is available from the Vatican online as well.
This is a wonderful tool! I’m considering adding it to my site, but the limitation to the Douay-Rheims kind of has me iffy (I’m currently using the ESV plugin, as that translation seems awfully close to the RSV 2nd Catholic edition).
I think the RSV (with the Apocrypha, though not the Catholic edition) has been pretty open with regard to licenses for computer things such as this, if you ask them.
Apart from that, my one suggestion is to make it clear to readers that the links in the box open new windows to show the other translations. One might expect clicking “NAB” to make the text simply switch from Douay to NAB in the pop-up.
Hi, Mike. Thank you for checking out the CRE.
As a matter of fact, the RSV-CE is my favourite translation, and I am very much open to making more translations available to CRE users, giving them the option to pick which one is used in the popups. I will explore the possibility of using the Protestant RSV, or the RSV-CE, or the ESV. My only concern is violation of copyright, or otherwise depriving biblical translators of their rightful dues. If you had any URLs that would help appease my apprehensions, please let me know.
What would be the best way to indicate that the links open in new windows? I’m thinking perhaps I will change “View in” to “Open in”.
Regarding the RSV: consider this notice which was put up just this year. An online RSV was taken down. I also note that the RSV is not one of the translations searchable at the popular Protestant site, BibleGateway.com (though the ESV is).
Here are the use policies for the RSV and NRSV. As far as I can tell, my use would fall outside of the domain of permissionless quoting, on account of me including the entire text as a downloadable add-on to the CRE. It does look like an individual blogger might be able to stay within the policies on a post-by-post basis, though.
Confusingly, I see that EWTN offers a Bible search using the RSV-CE. I will add a link to this in the CRE.
The NRSV policy doesn’t seem to preclude you using the entire bible in a database, provided you speak to them before you do it. There are online Bible sites who host full texts (BibleGateway comes immediately to mind) so I bet the NRSV folks have dealt with similar situations.
Since the CRE has such great potential to share the Word, I bet that you could make a case for backing up their full database as long as you didn’t sell it to anyone.
Scott: Well, a distinction needs to be drawn between
(a) me (a single host or website) storing the full text, and making small excerpts available to others, and (b) me making the full text available to others (bloggers) for use on their sites.
While (a) might be acceptable, but I suspect (b) is not. Nevertheless, I may try to contact the copyright holder and see what the possibilities are.
That’s a very good point. Maybe they are nice people and they’ll see the value in this extension.
BTW I noticed that I was nattering on about including the Catechism in earlier comment. I’m not quite sure why I forgot that the extension already includes the CCC…
Hi, I installed the plugin and configured it (fixed the CSS colors)
I noticed that on my site, the popup doesn’t work nor can I click on a bible link for it to open. The text excerpt works fine.
You can see the problem here: http://sacreddevotion.com/2007/11/12/infant-holy-infant-lowly-lyrics/
At least for me, no pop-up. I tried in Firefox and Explorer on a PC running Vista. The text excerpt works great.
I hope you’ll let me know how to add other bibles to the plugin.
Feel free to add mine to the list of sites using the plugin.
Christopher: I believe I have fixed this in 0.8.10. Try to upgrade to this version, and let me know if that does or does not fix the problem. (Don’t forget to backup your CSS.)
Hi, That fix worked! I just changed the colors back in the CSS to match my site now: http://sacreddevotion.com/2007/11/12/infant-holy-infant-lowly-lyrics/ displays the pop up correctly.
I have another idea to make this better. In addition to using ! to disable the popup, it would be useful if the write page would have an option (in the sidebar) to disable the popup by Post. Say for example you have a page that mentions many verses. It would be useful to just select to disable the popup for the post instead of every instance.
Thank you for fixing my bug/conflict.
Christopher: Try the latest version. I added a feature which is not quite a clickable option, but it is something that accomplishes what you wanted. When I tried to implement a clickable checkbox or something, it looked too obtrusive.
[...] Scriptural references will link directly to the Douay-Rheims translation, courtesy of the excellent Catholic Reference Extension for WordPress. References to other documents will link to sources I find [...]
Hi,
I have installed your Catholic Reference Plugin in my site. I think is great, really, and I appreciate your generosity. I am a Latin teacher, and run a blog about Latin language, in Spanish, and I thought it would be great to make something similar to the Catholic Reference for the classic authors (Vergil, Cicero…). So, I started to modify you plugin –just as a test– and managed to add a book of the Aeneid. (You can see it working in http://lengualatina.org/blog/archives/22). But I realize that in order to install both puglins (I pretend to call this one ERTAC – Extension de Referencia de Autores Clasicos) I need to change the names of the .php, .css and .js files. However, when I rename them, the plugin does not work. Can you tell me if it is possible to change the names, or if there is any other way to avoid conflic? I’ll appreciate your help (I am a philosopher, not a progammer).
Thanks, and God bless you too.
Moris
Hello, Moris. Thank you for using the CRE.
I think it would be best if development efforts were consolidated. I don’t mind adding even secular texts as downloadable add-ons to the CRE. Why don’t you post your full code (including the Latin texts) to Pastie and then give me the URLs to the pastes. I will look over your stuff, and then incorporate as much as I can, so that the CRE can accommodate user-added texts.
Actually, I thought that as a first instance. The only problem I find is the name… Some people could think that it is only about Catholic references. What do you think?
I think the idea of making additional texts as possible sepatate downloads is great.
Is there a guide for preparing a text for use with the plugin?
Moris: Marketing issues are my problem.
If you, as an “inside” user, know that it can be used beyond Catholic texts, then that’s all you need to know. I may or may not rename the plugin in the future, as I see fit.
Christopher: The code as it stands is incapable of using generic texts. I will have to modify it.
Got this up and running on a beta for my new site. It’s pretty slick, although is there any way to get the tool to list an entire chapter? I’m thinking specifically of the Psalms, where I’d like to quote a Psalm in its entirety. Right now I’ve got to go look up the line numbers and do something like “Psalm 23: 1-4″.
Pistos,
I am not sure if I understand. What does it mean to be an “inside” user? My points are: 1. I’d gladly share classic Latin and Greek texts to be used in the CRE. 2. I want to make an an extension for classic texts for a Spanish Speaking audience. 3. Can I use and modify your code to make 2.?
Moris: The code is GPL, so you can do almost anything you like with it. You just have to stay within the bounds of the GPL.
I was just saying that I think our efforts would be best spent if you collaborated with me and I kept going as the main developer. I would like to change the code so that texts can easily be formatted and added to any CRE user’s blog.
Pistos: you are absolutely right. I could make the Spanish version… I am interested in Scripture, but not as much as in the Classics. I will start with Latin texts, and then I will add Scriptures. What about the name?
Moris: If you fork the project and make your own version of the plugin, then you can name it whatever you like.
But why don’t you give me the URL of one or two of the Classics texts you would like to see included? I will begin work on their incorporation.
Scott: I’ll see what I can do. In the mean time, you can do something like Psalm 23:1-100, though that may look strange.
Pistos: what I am doing is downloading texts from gutenberg.org and then formatting them with text editor.
[...] This is a test of the Catholic Reference Extension. [...]
[...] Catholic Reference Extension [...]
[...] that this plugin will only work on the WordPress platform for now. You can read more about it at: http://blog.purepistos.net/index.php/cre/ Trackback: http://blog.purepistos.net/index.php/cre/trackback/ addthis_url = [...]
[...] over the reference. Special thanks to Pistos who has made this possible by way of his “Catholic Reference Exrension“ addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fhalfthekingdom.org%2Fwordpress%2F%3Fp%3D85′; [...]
Pistos: Thank you for your plugin. I’m replacing the D-R version with KJV using the D-R numbering system, and all is well. Is it possible to make the popups “sticky” and movable, so that a reader can view both the full post and the Bible references at the same time? Again, thanks for your contribution.
Hi, Bob: Thanks for trying the CRE. Sticky will be fairly simple, but movable will be more challenging. I’ll consider it.
Pistos: One reason for wanting moveable popups is that if the popup is near an embedded flash audio player, the popup does not display properly. You can see this effect at http://www.actsseventeen.com/2008/03/02/audio_2008-03-02am (Obviously, with CRE I won’t need to type the text any more!) Thanks again.
Wow, this is wonderful work. Very Nice. Would you happen to know if this works in WP 2.5 or in WordPressMU? I would like to refer this to friends – priests and laymen – who are blogging in both platforms. Awesome.
Thank you and may God continue to bless you.
mercime: This blog is (at the time of your comment) running on WordPress 2.5, so yes, it works with WP 2.5.
CatholicDestination.com is running WordPress MU, and it works for them.
Pistos. I was excited at finding this extension, I didn’t even check the source code of this page re WP v2.5
May I assume that for WPMU installation, this is placed in the regular plugin folder instead of the mu-plugin folder?
Thank you very much for the info.
I’ve actually never run WPMU, so I wouldn’t know. It doesn’t sound hard to test both places, though, right?
[...] CRE, by Pistos at Catholicism Computes, is a WordPress plugin which activates both Scripture references and references to the Catechism of [...]
Runs on WPMU as you can see it on my site here.
The only problem i encounter is whenever i try to gzip my site, the plugin stops working. It would be nice to know if there is a fix around this. Other than that, excellent plugin!
mercime, yes, i installed it on my regular plugin folder instead of the mu-plugin folder and it works. My site runs on the latest build of WPMU (version 1.5.1). Hope this helps!
Lukas: So… is it working even when gzipped, or should I investigate a problem?
Hi Pistos, unfortunately it does not work when site is gzipped. I have my site running without the gzip but WP-Cache is enabled though. I use a PHP gzip compression method, btw. If you have a workaround for this i would be greatful.
Another problem I encountered was that after I activated CRE, I got a ‘Done but with errors’ in the admin site. Don’t really know what the problem is, but admin panel seem to work fine
How exactly are you compressing? mod_gzip, or some PHP-level compression? WP plugin?
And how exactly is it not working? Rendering 0 bytes? Rendering some bytes, but garbled? Or rendering the correct HTML, but not compressing?
I have tried WP-plugin wordpress compress and nGzip. I believe they are both php-level compression. They successfully compress the site however, CRE didn’t work. right now we are getting an error message in the admin when we activate CRE. it says ‘done, but with errors on page’ Object doesn’t support this property or method.
Okay, thanks. I will investigate those two. Meanwhile, have you considered using server-level gzip compression?
Thank you for taking the time and trouble to help us with our situation.
I would love to but we’re currently on a shared hosting environment and as you know, we have limited access on how we want Apache to be configured. So we had to use other compression methods. To be honest, we’re self-taught web developers and only at this for less than a year.
Hi Pistos, any progress with the investigations? Btw, our site is a Catholic blog host and not a personal blog as listed above.
Lukas: Sorry, I’ve been busy with various things. Could you provide me with homepages or download links to the gzip plugin/module that you think you would settle with? I will try to test it with my own server and blog.
Pistos: Hi, we managed to solve the gzipping problem using the method in the following site: http://www.killersites.com/mvnforum/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=9276 .I hope that helps. But we are still having problems getting CRE to be xhtml validated and CRE still causes admin panel to be done with errors. Thanks for your time Pistos
Lukas: You are not the first to bring up markup validity. As I’ve mentioned to others (elsewhere), I am creating invalid markup for the sake of making the plugin code easier to develop and maintain (it is simpler). I don’t anticipate aiming for 100% validity soon; sorry.
Are the admin panel errors fatal, or do they otherwise prevent you from configuring the CRE?
@Lukas: Thank you for the plugin upload info. Got to upgrade the WPMU install where I consolidated all the blogs of priests and parish ministry leaders – just wary about upgrading to WPMU 1.5.1, so many horror stories heard
@Pistos: more power to you and thanks again for the plugin!
Pistos, I’ve been using CRE for several months now; and I have it displaying the Bible version of my choice. Just today I ran into a conflict with the newly installed pageMash plugin’s admin page. If I temporarily disable CRE, then pageMash admin works fine. The pageMash author suggested adding some exclusion code to CRE so that CRE doesn’t load when the pageMash.php page is open (example: >>>if(strpos($_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ], ‘pagemash.php’) !== true) {
Bob: I have fixed the issue, and am running the latest CRE now on my own blog before I release it publicly. The problem has to do with the fact that WordPress loads all plugins’ admin headers all the time, so each plugins’ headers (CSS, Javascript, etc.) has the chance to fight with one another. Bad design on WordPress’ part, though I hear there is a way to make your admin_header appear only on specific admin pages (such as your own plugin’s admin page!); and not using a hackish if() statement.
Anyway, the fix is to upgrade to the latest jQuery. If you want to beta test this along with me, download version 0.8.14 and unpack that over your existing installation. Otherwise just wait a few days for me to make sure I didn’t break anything.
Pistos, Thanks for the quick reply-and the fix. I’ll let you know how I make out. (And I apologize for not using CODE markup in my previous message)
Pistos, It appears that all is well, and pageMash is playing nicely with CRE. Thanks! And the drop shadow effect is a nice addition.
Glad it’s working for you, Bob. Beware about the drop shadow, because it affects your RSS feed insofar as it adds a duplicate block of text.
As well, I think you should be able to go back and edit your own comments on my blog. Look for an “Edit This” link on your comments.
Pistos, It seems that the new jquery library prevents my WordPress write-post page from functioning properly. Notably, the arrows for opening and closing options are missing. Again, deactivating CRE temporarily will work around this.
Okay, Bob, I have finally wrestled WordPress’ hackish nature to the ground, and managed to get it to let things play nicely. Try this updated 0.8.14 tarball.
Pistos, your wrestling practice has paid off, and I think you’re ready for the Olympics. All the kids do seem to be playing nicely now. Thanks for your persistence.
I am using the plugin at http://bws.biblista.net. I find it very useful. Is there a chance of making the references point to the Compendium of Social Doctrines? I would volunteer to provide the text of the compendium. It is already available on the web anyway. Just tell me how to format it and I’ll work on it immediately.
alberto: Thanks for your comments. Your request falls under the notion of me making the CRE use any generic texts which are appropriately formatted. The code as it stands is not capable of doing this. I’m not sure when I can get around to developing that.
This is what we need for our website. Any one can appreciate the amount of work was put into this plugin. Great job!
Hi,
What a wonderful extension. I installed it for all of our bloggers on StBlogs.
Unfortunately, when the plugin is activated, it makes the Upload Media icon disappear.
So I have had to delete it for now.
Any ideas? We can’t wait to have this up again.
Lee: Thank you for your kind comments. Could you describe your situation in greater detail? What version of WP or WP-MU do you have? What version of the CRE? Can you give me a screenshot of the Upload Media icon(s)? Because I see the Add Media icons in my installations regardless of whether the CRE is activated or not.
Can you please tell me how to change the colour of the text that pops up. At the moment it is appearing white on white.
roller: The plugin simply uses the normal text colour from whatever WordPress theme is in use. I see that it is being taken from the body { } definition in your style.css file.
To change the colour for only scripture and CCC popups, specify a CSS definition for the “scripture_text” and “ccc_text” classes. Like this:
Let me know if that doesn’t work.
Thanks very much. That works great. Congratulations on the plugin.
I would like to move the credit for the plugin down a little on the page. Can you tell me where I can modify the padding if that is what I am looking for?
roller: Try:
Hi Thanks for last response. I now imagine I have a bigger problem. I must start by letting you know that I am very new to WordPress and could be totally wrong in my conclusions that follow. When I activate CRE it appears to prevent me from activating other themes because the option does not appear on the top right of new themes preview window. Secondly I get an error message when I try to add an image to a post. The image uploads ok but I don’t get the show option to insert it into the post. Even as I write this I feel I am probably wrong and there is unlikely to be a link between the plugin and the errors I am encountering so I apologise in advance if this is the case.
Hey, I’ve been having some problems with the extension for awhile now. No popups, just the text at the bottom of the post. I don’t know if it’s not playing nice with another one, or if I lost some CSS at some point, or what. Any ideas?
Never mind; I just had the directory name for the extension named differently than “catholic-reference.”
Sorry…never mind the “never mind.” The references now don’t show up at the bottom OR as a popup.
Mike: I have looked at your site, and it doesn’t appear that the CRE is even running properly on the server side. So I don’t think this is a Javascript or CSS issue. What version of WordPress and what version of the CRE are you running?
Another important thing to verify is: in the CRE settings page in the WordPress admin panel, ensure that your “Douay-Rheims Bible text directory:” and “Catechism of the Catholic Church text directory:” are set correctly. Those directories should have many text files in them, containing the Scripture and Catechism texts. If these directories are not set, or the texts can’t be found, the CRE will not transform any references on your site.
Okay, I forgot the settings page was there, and changed the text directories. Now it’s back to its previous behavior (texts shown at the bottom of each post…the texts for the top post on my front page actually show up at the bottom of EVERY post).
Mike: I’m looking at your site and clicking on the references; things seem to be working for me? What browser and operating system are you using? It works for me in Opera, Firefox and IE7.
I do see it working in IE7 and Google Chrome, as well, but not in Firefox 3.0.8. I can’t imagine how it would conflict with any extension I’m running, so I’m clueless.
Mike: It works for me in Firefox 3.0.8, in Linux. Perhaps you could try disabling all your Firefox add-ons. If that fixes it, you can enable them one by one to find the culprit.
I disabled both extensions and plugins, and it still looked the same. Here is a screenshot: http://www.mikeroesch.com/screenshot.png (the verses show up like this on every post on the page, not just the one where there is a reference)
Things did look fine on Win XP Firefox at work, though, so it’s just something I’ve done to Firefox, apparently. Thanks for trying!
Mike: Well, one other thing that I can think of is maybe you have some local CSS stylesheets that you apply. Otherwise, I’m not sure. But the CRE on your site seems to look fine by all evidence over here, so, I suppose you don’t have anything to worry about as far as your visitors are concerned.
Hi, some Catechism references do not seem to work. Could you please visit this link and tell me why certain references are not coming up?
Here is the link: http://bws.biblista.net/2009/05/the-coming-of-the-holy-spirit/
Thank you in advance.
biblista: I have confirmed the problem. I think there is a bug in the plugin. For now, you can work around it by making those four lines into a list (<ul>).
Just found this plug-in for a site I’m working on. Great job!
One quick question though – is there any way to add the words “Douay-Rheims” after the scripture quotations? In other words, in the pop-up I would like it to display something like:
1 Peter 3:15 (Douay-Rheims)
The site I’m designing will be sensitive to where the quotes come from and I would like to give this added assurance.
Thank you!
@Matt: Try this new version I just made. It has an option in the CRE settings page to show or not show the Bible version in the popup.
Thanks Pistos – I’m uploading it now. Once the site is finished I’ll send you the link so you can add it to your list. I can’t give it to you yet because its on the DL at the moment.
I’ve tried valiantly to get this to work. I get the same kind of output as Mike Roesch, above, in both firefox and safari. These are popular browsers, and I can’t use this plugin if it doesn’t work with them, so I’m going to disable it. I had high hopes!
@Father Pat: I’d like to work with you to get it going. Unfortunately, if you’ve disabled the plugin, I can’t pay a visit to see it working or failing to work. If you are able, perhaps you could set up a second, alternative test site running a duplicate of your blog under a different domain or subdomain, then we can test over there. If you don’t have the luxury of additional hosting, I could look into it for you if you packaged up your blog, both the files (PHP, HTML, CSS, etc.) and the database dump.
The CRE has been used on many blogs, so I believe there is not a major issue with the plugin itself. I just tested it now under Firefox 3.0.11, and my site appears fine.
One thing you might try: Ensure the “draw drop shadows” option is disabled (unchecked). I notice just now that when I enabled it, it causes some rendering problems.
Hi, Pistos, thanks for your offer to help. I have re-enabled the plugin and put in a test post at http://blog.fathermulcahy.com/2009/07/30/testing-1-2-3/ … Anything you can do to help would be very much appreciated, because I would LOVE to use this plugin! BTW, at your suggestion, I did disable the drop shadow option, but no change. Thanks.
Hello, Pistos. If you can suggest anything, it would be great. I have the plugin activated now, and did a test post. You can see it at http://blog.fathermulcahy.com. Thanks!
@Father Pat: Sorry for the delayed response. I see you’ve taken down the test posts again, for worry of having a broken site for any lengthy period of time. How about this: Is there any way you can package up your WordPress theme, and send it to me? pistos at “gee”mail dot com. As well, please list all your active plugins, so I can see if there are potential conflicts.
Any chance for a Drupal-ized or Joomla-tized version of this plugin?
I would be willing to help
I am experiencing the same problem as Mike Roesch about is there any work around for this?
@mak sev: Thankfully, you still left the plugin running by the time I caught this comment. I went to look at your site, and it looks like the plugin’s Javascript is not installed. It should be at http://kursilyo.com/wp-content/plugins/catholic-reference/catholic-reference.js . Try to ensure that it’s there, then check if the plugin works at that point.
(edit) In fact, the CSS isn’t there, either. None of the items under /wp-content/plugins/catholic-reference/ are present. That’ll definitely make the plugin not work right.
@Jeff: I don’t have a lot of free time, so I don’t think there’s much chance of getting that out of me, especially since I run neither Drupal nor Joomla for any sites. Feel free to use the code or the texts, though. The plugin is open source, after all.
thanks pistos finally got it to work seems to be a problem with the path.
Thanks and God Bless!
@mak sev: Great! Glad you got it sorted. Can you share what you fixed, so as to help other people that run into the same issue?
I’ve installed CRE using wordpress auto install
it installed on the folder catholic-reference-for-wordpress
/public_html/wp-content/plugins/catholic-reference/texts/ccc
i just removed the “for-wordpress”
then it worked
Thanks, Mak, that’s how I installed CRE also, and I tried it and it worked. The only thing is now, I get two popups for every time I go over the link, but I’ll take that rather than it not working at all!
Peace, Fr. Pat
@Father Pat: Thanks for returning and trying the CRE again. I’ve visited your site, and seems that the Scripture references are not activating, either by hover or by click. Are they working for you?
As for having two popups: See if disabling the drop shadow in the CRE admin settings makes any difference.
The CRE works funny on FireFox 3. Right now it works well with IExplore. I don’t know whether you’ve checked browser compatibility issues with the plugin.
@biblista: Please be more descriptive.
I just tested it now with Firefox 3.0.14, and it works as I expect on this page.
Hi Pistos,
This is a way cool plug in, but I can’t seem to make it work? I did the manual ftp to my site and nothing. I have a blog that talks about living the will of God and plan to use a lot of references to it. Any idea?
Jon
Jon: Are you still having trouble? I visited your site, and it looks like it’s working.
Hey Pistos,
Yes, I have it working, sorry it took a while to get back to you. I did just post a post with quite a few references in it and when I mouse over them they keep brining up the same Scripture? It is the post titled Thanksgiving.
God Bless,
Jon themastershabit.com
Hi. Thank you for this plugin. I’ve been fighting with it however for awhile. Managed to fix the missing texts and rename the folder. However, I’m not getting the popup. Blockquote works fine. Any ideas? Tried it in IE and FF. Thank you!
@Kelly: Have you installed it from the tarballs available for download from this blog? You need to ensure you have the CSS and Javascript files in the right places, as well. What’s the URL of the website you’re trying to install to? I can take a look.
Hi. Thank you for the fast reply! I downloaded it from here. Have deleted and moved things around a few times trying to figure it out. Moved the java out of its own folder and into the text, into the main and back again.
The jquery,option-hover, & option-click.js are in their own folder in the main catholic-reference folder (which is in the correct plugin folder). The catholic-reference.js, .css, and .php are in the main catholic-reference folder.
Here’s the site: olp.techbasix.com/news/
Thanx again for your help
Pistos –
Plugin installation was flawless. No problems at all! I was going to use something else, but the addition of the use of the DRB and an option to link to the NAB made your plugin the clear choice.
The hands-down winner, IMHO, for any Catholic WP blog site.
God Bless You Richly!
Bob CatholicBibleInAYear.org
Hi again. I am also unable to disable the Catholic Reference on pages even though it does show the option. I can fill the check box but when I update the page the check box unchecks itself anyway.
@Kelly: It looks like the WordPress theme you are using has some CSS that is conflicting with the CRE. To verify, try temporarily switching to a different WordPress theme (such as the default one).
There are several things about the theme that conflict. For starters, the post content is set to “overflow: hidden”. You can remove that instruction from two places in style.css: line 1730 and line 1047.
Then around line 685, set the z-index of the Block class to -1 instead of 0.
There are probably several other changes you need to make to the theme to make it cooperate with the CRE. It’s probably easier just to pick a different theme.
Let me know how it goes.
You are correct. It works in a plain theme. If I knew more about css…. I’ll give your instruction a try… see if deleting a couple lines and changing that block class will work.
I have a dummy site that is identical to the actual site, so any mess ups are recoverable. Thank you again.
Well I was going to give it a try but my css isn’t showing the same line numbers as yours so I would be just shooting in the dark at which line to remove, which to keep.
I put a lot of work into this theme so not so easy to just use a new one. Guess I do without. Thanx anyway.
@Kelly: Sorry about that. If I have time, I will see if I can cook up a new CRE version which can work with themes like yours.
Thanx for trying anyway! Happy New Year
Hi, great plugin! Thanks for this. We are using it at our site but I just noticed that for refs longer than two refs, it doesn’t just fail to link the extra refs, it deletes them altogether.
Matthew 4:18; 10:2; 14:28-29; 15:15-16; 16:16, 18, 22-23; 17:1, 4, 24, 26; 18:21; 19:27; 26:33, 35, 37, 40, 58, 69, 73, 75;
Becomes:
Matthew 4:18; 26:33,75;
Anything I’m doing wrong or is there a work around for this?
BTW, I can insert “Matthew” between every two refs and it works. I was just hoping there was a way to get it to link without that (or at least get it not to delete the extra ref.)
I want to use your plugin to enhance my website. However, I can get it to only partially work.
But…
Any help?
Thanks!
Kenneth: Can you put up an example page for me to take a look?
Pistos,
I love your plugin, I just wish I could get it to work! I believe I have a similar problem to Kelly (above): CRE doesn’t play well with my theme. I’m willing to try editing the CSS, except I wouldn’t know what to change… If you have the chance to take a look at my site, and if you can figure out a fix, I would greatly appreciate your help.
God bless, Chris
Chris: I can’t really help extensively, but I took a look at your site. Line 307 of wp-content/themes/mystique/style.css is a “position: relative” CSS property. If you remove that, then the CRE popups appear normally. Unfortunately, I would suspect that that line is important for the proper functioning of that WordPress theme. But this could give you some clues as to how you might adjust the theme to get the CRE working on your site. I hope this helps.
I’ve seemed to have lost this functionality on my site. Since my theme has not changes, I have to assume it is either due to a WP upgrade or a browser upgrade. If this page is set to use CRE, the examples above are not working either for me.
Any sense on how to fix the break? Thanks!
Hi there,
is there a way of installing this on an ordinary, non-WordPress website?
Pistos, Most people wil write only when they have problems. I am writing to let you know that a slightly modified version of CRE has been running flawlessly with King James Bible translation on our ActsSeventeen.com site since 2008. . And now I want you to know that we are using a more modified version of CRE to display a modern Greek Bible on ActsSeventeen.GR . . Thank you for your contribution to publishing the word of God.