Google Plus For Business

Google now offers their OWN Google WordPress Plugin

Google has just released their own Google Friend Connect WordPress Plugin. This is not a outside developer plugin, but a direct from GOOGLE WordPress plugin.

I will warn you now, this is harder to install than the original GFC gadget that everyone hated on and could not get to work. Don’t worry this is worth it and these instructions are a little easier to understand than Google’s.

Example sites

WordPress

Drupal

phpBB

Go to Google’s Friend Connect Site

Log into your Gmail account to get access or use whatever credentials you used before if you already created GFC gadgets for your sites here.

Follow the instructions and FTP the canvas and rpc files to your ROOT directory, this is the top level directory at GoDaddy and is public_html in CPANEL sites. (that is just about eveyone else but GoDaddy)

If you have GFC already installed on your site you should not have to do this. We shall see when I set up the plugin in a few minutes.

Get your site ID

You will have to go to the “members gadgets” link and select the first one called “members gadget” and under option #3 “Create the HTML code” click the button.

The site ID number that Google is going to want you to use to set up the plugin is now at the bottom of the code and it is also in the address bar in the query string for those who understand what a querystring is.

Take a look at the screen shot and you can click it here to get a full size view.

Get the plugin

Go to this link for the instructions for your site platform and click the downloads tab at the top. This will give you the link to your particular plugin.

Now is where it gets a little tricky. These are Google’s instructions.

* Make a new directory under wp-content/plugins called fc_plugin

* Download the contents of the wordpress/src folder into the wp-content/plugins/fc_plugin directory

* Open wp-content/plugins/fc_plugin/fc_plugin.php. Look for the function called fc_get_site_id(). Replace the number in this function with your Site ID.

* Check that the path in google.friendconnect.container.setParentUrl() matches where you put the canvas.html and rpc_relay.html on your site.

* Login as admin in WordPress, look for the plugins menu and activate the plugin.

Here is the easy way

Download the plugin by saving it to your desktop.

Unzip the files and extract the entire thing as the default file folder name “WordPress”

Copy this text: fc_plugin

Now open the file folder by double clicking the folder you just extracted to the desktop called “WordPress”

Right click on a blank spot in the folder, and select “new” and then “folder”

When it adds the folder it will name it “New Folder” by default. Right click the folder and select “rename” and then paste in the text you just copied by hitting CTRL + V (hold down CTRL then press V at the same time).

Now hit enter and you have you folder to upload to you WordPress plugins directory. But do not do this yet.

Next open the src folder and right click a blank spot in the folder and select “select all”

Now right click any of the highlighted file and select “copy”

Next to to your new file folder fc_plugin, open it and right click and select “paste” and this will move the required files.

Finally look for the file called fc_plugin.php. Right click it and select “open with” and then select Notepad to open the file in the text editor.

Almost there hang on!

Look for the function called fc_get_site_id() the easy way by hitting CTRL + F and opening the find text dialog box.

Not copy this text fc_get_site_id() and paste it into the find box. Since it is text you are going to need to surround it with ” so it will look like this:

function fc_get_site_id () {
return ‘YOUR-SITE-ID';

Now look for google.friendconnect.container.setParentUrl() using the search function (CTRL +F) again.

In my copy of the plugin the path was originally ‘/blog/wordpress’ but I set it to ‘/’ since it is the root that I installed the Google files canvas and rpc to.

Now you should be ready to go. Upload the files to the /wordpress-content/plugins directory. You are only uploading the fc_plugin folder we created and moved the file to.

Activate the plug in…

Now go to the plugins link in your WordPress blog and activate the plugin. If you have the proper items in place it will run on the site with no more permissions than what I described here.

I will be testing this more over the course of the week and let you know exactly what gives. Right now I have to give up on this and keep my site live since there is a fair amount traffic but I will be continuing to work on this as it is a awesome option.

The example sites above really impressed me due to the fact that it provides thread reply to links rather than just inline comments. Real slick and a great improvement of Google Friend Connect from Google themselves.