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Introduction

When working on my new site, I felt the urge to place one of these ugly Skype buttons on my Contact page. Simply pasting the script from [1] didn’t work so I browsed the web for a Skype button plugin. Anti Veeranna did a plugin before, but unfortunately, the download doesn’t work. I decided to gain experience with WP plugin writing, and started of with a simple Skype button plugin called skypebt.

News & History

2006-11-12: Version 0.9 of the skypebt-plugin is released.

What’s it? And why do I need it?

This plugin basically has no use except for displaying a Skype button in your page or post. It can’t even be used to display the button in your sidebar or any other template-defined part of your site. The plugin allows choosing a predefined button, optionally being Skype online status aware.

You probably don’t need it at all. You only need it, if you want to display a Skype button in Wordpress. I know there’s another Skype button plugin available - at least there’s a page about it. You probably want to use my plugin because the download link of the other one doesn’t work.

That’s how it could look:

Download

wp-skypebt_0_9.zip (2.1kb)

Installation

The installation is as easy as it is with all (or most) Wordpress plugins.

1. Download the .zip file and unpack it to some local directory.
2. Upload all the files to your Wordpress plugin directory (wp-content/plugins).
3. Activate the plugin in the plugin configuration panel in your Wordpress administration interface.

You now find a skypebt panel in the Options of your administration interface. The plugin is now installed in working. On the skypebt configuration panel, you can enter your Skype user name. The plugin fills in a default value (exploded from your administrator email address) which you most likely have to change.

Beside setting the user name, you have the possibility to set a tag line which is going to be in the title-attribute of the image html-tag. The next section on the administration panel let’s you chose the design of the button. It’s following the pre-created buttons from the Skype button page [1].

For now, there are two buttons which are indicating your current Skype online status. If you want to use one of these, follow the instructions by Skype on [2] to enable the status indication.

To include the newly defined Skype button, but the following line of code into your page/post content: {skypebt}. The button will then show up at this position in your page/post.

The Future

By now, the plugin only allows to display the default Skype buttons. I’d like to add the possibility to have custom designed buttons configurable. Also, the button definition data is now hard-coded in the PHP source of the plugin. Changes of the button design at Skype will require a new plugin version. It would be nice to have this saved somewhere. Also, the CSS of the button is by now hard-coded. User definition of the CSS will follow, too. Conclusion: I’ll somewhen make a new version of the plugin with more customization possible.

[1]: http://www.skype.com/intl/de/share/buttons/
[2]: http://www.skype.com/intl/de/share/buttons/status.html