Powwow - Item tag parser for PHP, phpBB3, Wordpress, more.

Post by thomshouse

Hello... Just wanted to make available to the community a tool I've created to take advantage of Wowhead's awesome "Powered By" feature. Powwow is a very simple PHP5 class that can be used to build plugins for parsing tags. It's currently available as a standalone class, a Wordpress plugin, and a phpBB3 MOD.

I know there are other addons out there that accomplish the same or similar functionality. It's worth noting that Powwow makes use of a two-pass parsing method. In my opinion, this makes it a bit more efficient than most similar addons.

The way it works is simple:

When a user submits content, the Powwow plugin parses the content for tags, looks up the item names via Wowhead's XML interface, and appends the item number and quality to the tag as attributes. Powwow ignores any tags that already have item number attributes, so an item is only ever looked up once, regardless of how many times content is edited and re-submitted.
When the content is displayed, Powwow parses the tags again, this time converting them into HTML links to Wowhead, complete with CSS class (i.e. "q1"). Any item tags without an item number (in the event of a failed lookup) are routed to Wowhead's search page.
In the case of the Wordpress plugin, Powwow automatically inserts the "Powered by Wowhead" javascript into the page header, so that no template modification is necessary.

So there it is... Very simple. I'm looking forward to developing a message board plugin in the near future, although I haven't settled on a forum software yet. I'd love to see suggestions for other features and/or plugins, and if anyone uses Powwow to develop other plugins, I'd be happy to host them at the original site. Hope this is useful to some... Thanks!

Powwow Project Homepage

Post by thomshouse

Update: Project has been renamed to Powwow (was previously Headwind) and support for alternative tagnames other than has been added.

Post by thomshouse

I have developed a Powwow MOD for phpBB3:
Powwow 1.1 Mod for phpBB3

Powwow - Item tag parser for PHP, phpBB3, Wordpress, more.

Post Reply