HOW TO: Integrate Google+ Into Your WordPress Site

 by Kelli Shaver

This month’s hot topic has been, without a doubt, Google+. Whether the new social service from the world’s largest search company will be a “Facebook killer” remains to be seen, but one thing’s for certain: This is one social network you don’t want to ignore.

When it comes to getting found, Google+ is fast becoming a great asset for bloggers and content producers thanks to its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools. In this post, we’ll show you a few ways to start spreading a little of that Google+ love on your WordPress-powered website.

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Display Your Google+ Profile Information

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Software developer John Henson from PlusDevs has developed a handy, easy to use WordPress widget that displays your Google+ profile on your blog. The setup is quick and simple: Install the plug-in and drag the widget into your sidebar. Just fill out the form and you’re done.

You can also incorporate the widget into your template with only a few lines of PHP code, giving you the flexibility to place it anywhere within your layout.

You can learn more about the widget in the official blog postor jump straight to the code on GitHub.

Unofficial Google+ user tracking site SocialStatistics.com also offers an embeddable Google+ widget. Simply add your profile to their database and grab the widget code from your page on their site.

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Add the +1 Button

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If you’re not already using the Google +1 button, consider taking a moment to add it to your site. This is a great way to let users save, promote and find their favorite content. The +1 button only takes a few minutes to integrate with your site and works with any Google profile. While this isn’t a Google+ specific feature, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it integrated with the service. Either way, it’s another great way of adding an additional avenue for promotion and sharing.

You can learn more about the +1 button from Google.

To add it to your WordPress site, you can either use the official +1 button code generator from Google or take a look at the myriad +1 button WordPress plug-ins available.

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Use a Google+ Inspired Theme

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Do you love the look of Google+’s clean, intuitive layout and unobtrusive interface? For the die-hard fan (or, hey, maybe you run a blog that’s centered around the service), there are already a few Google+ inspired WordPress themes for your perusal.

WP Plus

WP Plus is a fixed-width, 3 column Google+ inspred WordPress theme supporting custom content menus, styled sticky-posts and valid XHTML/CSS code. Clean, fast-loading and SEO optimized, WP Plus gives your blog the Google+ look and feel in just minutes.

PlusOne

Similar to WP Plus, PlusOne is another 3-column, fixed-width Google+ styled theme that supports custom WordPress menus. It’s a clean and well-designed theme, but it does take some liberties with how it translates Google+ to WordPress (so it doesn’t look quite as accurate to Google’s own design).

Reflex+

Reflex+ shares all of the features mentioned in the above two theme but it also brings in jQuery and incorporates AJAX for some tasks, such as the “read more” post navigation, helping it appear more fluid and seamless.

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Want More?

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Google+ is still a relatively new service locked behind an invite-only registration system. No doubt as time progresses and the service grows, there will be more options for publishers. Right now there are a couple of options if you’re a developer interested in having a go at creating your own Google+ plug-in.

If you’d like to gain access to the official Google+ API, you’ll need to sign up with Google to register interest in a Google+ developer account. Unfortunately, the API is not yet public. It’s unclear whether this will change as the service matures, but inquiring about developer access is certainly worth looking into if you want serious Google+ integration and sharing between your site and the service.

For a more portable (and presumably trimmed-down) solution, software developer Jason Striegel has put together a collection of PHP utilities for a locally-hosted Google+ API service. In its current state, the API will allow you to retrieve post and profile data and post to Google+. You can check out his code on GitHub. This is a great option to include within your own distributed code, such as WordPress plug-ins and widgets.

Android 3.2 SDK now available, new features get detailed

And just like that, it's official. After hearing about the next incremental step in Honeycomb's journey by way of Huawei's MediaPad, we've seen breadcrumbs about its functional differences. Today, we're being given the full shebang -- Google has just made official v3.2, boosting the API level to 13 and releasing the SDK into the wild in one fell swoop. The new build brings along optimizations for a "wider range of tablets," as well as "compatibility zoom for fixed-sized apps," media sync from SD card (huzzah!) and an extended screen support API. Head on down to the links below for a closer look, and expect to see this rolling out to [insert your favorite Android tablet here] in due time.

Windows Phone developers to get copy-and-paste tools and more Microsoft news from the week

By Mary Jo Foley

It’s that time: Time for the end-of-the-week Microsoft news roundup.
Developers are set to get an updated Windows Phone 7 software development kit (SDK) that will allow them to prep their applications for the first WP7 update (codenamed NoDo). The NoDo update will add copy-and-paste; performance tweaks; improved marketplace search and other minor updates to the Windows Phone OS 7. NoDo — originally known as the “January update” by Microsoft — is now expected in early February. Microsoft officials said in a podcast that developers would get the SDK refresh on February 4. As of nearly 4 pm ET, still no SDK. (A spokesperson said this afternoon that it was “coming soon.”)
Update: 6:40 pm ET: The announcement about the availability of the updated WP7 tools (known as the “January Update”) is out. Microsoft is warning it may take a while for the bits to make it onto the servers.
Will Nokia become a Windows Phone 7 OEM? There’s been a lot of back-and-forth among Wall Street analysts and other mobile watchers this week as to whether Nokia and Microsoft will announce a licensing deal in the coming week or two. Some believe Nokia is going to become a Windows Phone 7 OEM. Others believe Nokia will, instead, become an Android OEM. (Most seem to believe Nokia will not completely drop its Symbian OS platform, regardless of its path.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t see Nokia going the WP7 route, as they’d be required to adhere to a locked-down Microsoft chassis design — relegating the mobile phone leader to “mere” handset provider. Maybe Microsoft — hoping to boost its market share in a fell swoop (a la Yahoo in the search space) will bend the rules and give Nokia more leeway? If not, color me skeptical of Nokia going the WP7 route.
Windows Azure broadens beta of “Extra Small Instances” from private to public: Microsoft this week broadened the beta program for its entry-level developer-focused offer for Windows Azure, known as “Extra Small Instances.” Any and all interested customers can now use the beta version to prototype new applications on Microsoft’s cloud platform. (Note: This beta, like all Microsoft cloud betas, is paid, not free, and is .05 cents per hour.)
Microsoft adds new aliasing capability to Hotmail. Starting as of February 3, Hotmail users can add up to five aliases per year to their Hotmail account, up to fifteen aliases in total. The goal: To allow users to organize different types of mail inside a single Hotmail account without having to share their primary Hotmail address if they don’t want to.

Android 3 Honeycomb: Why this changes everything

By Ed Burnette

A preview of Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) has finally been released. Developers can download the new platform and updated SDK tools and play around with it before devices such as the Motorola Xoom hit the market in February.

First rumored at Google I/O 2010, and later demoed at CES, Honeycomb was designed from the ground up to support Android-based tablets. Does that mean it won’t run on smartphones too? Is it a fork, assuggested by Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols? Not according to the man behind the overhaul, Matias Duarte.

See also:

• Android ‘Honeycomb’ 3.0: Hands on experience
• Android 3.0 preview, SDK lands: Does this UI entice?
• Google has forked Android

You may remember Duarte as the designer of WebOS from his days at Palm. In an interview with Engadget earlier this month, he said:

What you see in Honeycomb is absolutely the direction for Android… We have to serve all of Android’s needs. [For example,] If Android shows up on a car, you’re going to see the same kinds of improvements, the same design philosophy, the same usability improvements, the same new paradigms, new tools, they’re all going to be part of that.

Indeed, with relaxed minimum requirements on buttons and other features, Android 3 may ultimately find itself on more types of hardware than earlier versions did. And unlike previous versions, you can expect to see official Google-branded apps like GMail, Maps, and the Android Market approved for use on more of those devices.

Existing apps will work on Android 3, but the developer can take steps to make the user interface fit in with the new design. These steps range from a simple 5 minute tweak to a more significant redesign.

The first step is to update your AndroidManifest.xml file to add a line like this:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="7" android:targetSdkVersion="Honeycomb"/>

Specifying targetSdkVersion=”Honeycomb” tells Android to use the new Holographic UI theme instead of the older defaults. Once the new version of Android is finalized and goes into production you will use “10″ instead of “Honeycomb”. Specifying minSdkVersion=”7″ indicates you can run on devices that have Android 2.1 and higher. Currently that’s over 87% of all devices in the field. You can use a lower value if your app supports older versions.

Next, you can provide alternative layouts for tablet-sized screens. Android 2.3 and above supports the “xlarge” resource qualifier that is activated for tablets. Let’s say you’re writing a twitter application. On a phone you want the twitter stream to occupy the whole screen, but on a tablet you have room to show the stream side-by-side with embedded pictures or conversations or the list of people you follow. To do that, you would put one layout definition (an XML file) in the res/layout directory, and a different one in the res/layout-xlarge directory.

See: Hello, Android! for to learn more about supporting a variety of Android versions, screen resolutions, and API levels in your programs.

With the easy stuff out of the way, you can then use the new APIs in Android 3 to extend your app to take advantage of some of the new user interface paradigms. For example, you could use the brand new Fragment class to define reusable panes within your app, and you could use the new android.animation package for animating the properties of Fragments, Views, or anything else. There’s also a new 3D framework called Renderscript that lets you build 3D scenes and write OpenGL shaders in a platform-independent language. Naturally, the more Honeycomb-specific eye candy you add to your app, the harder it will be for you to back-port it to earlier versions of Android. Be sure to test on all the platforms you support, and support only the platforms you test.

With careful design your programs can look fabulous on all Android versions, screen sizes, and form factors. So in that sense, Android 3 is an evolutionary release just like Android 1.6 or 2.0 was before it. However, the new tablet focus and APIs could enable new types of apps that we haven’t seen on the platform before. You might choose to take advantage of this opportunity to create revolutionary apps that are optimized specifically for Android 3 on tablets. It’s entirely up to you.