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Sprint Post Wordpress Plugin

// March 20th, 2006
Dan tagged this with No Tags

I’ve just finished the first version of my Sprint Post plugin. It includes the php file itself, plus a modified version of Wordpress 2.0’s “wp-mail.php”. The version that comes with Wordpress is too smart for its own good, and tries to munge the MIME formatted mail for us, which we don’t want. Replace your copy of wp-mail.php (which is in the root directory of your blog) with the one in the ZIP file. Then put sprintpost.php in wp-content/plugins/, go to your control panel and activate it.

Next, set up an email address to post from (this is in “Options > Writing”. You set up a cron job to ping /wp-mail.php on your site periodically (mine runs every two minutes).

The plugin yanks down the full-size image from Sprint’s picture mail server, plus a thumbnail as it appears in the picture mail notification email, and stores them in wp-content/uploads, under “postnumber”.jpg. Then it updates the post content with the thumbnail, linked to the full size. The “message” you send with the picture mail becomes the post title.

NOTE I’m getting lots of comments from people about timeout errors. From what I’ve determined, the timeout is occurring as the plugin downloads the image from Sprint’s server. I haven’t had a lot of time to get into it, but that definitely seems to be the case. Intermittant timeouts are a major pain to diagnose and solve, of course. It seems to happen more frequently via cron (or the Windows equivalent of cron). I don’t have a solution for this at this point. One thing I’m considering is hotlinking the image from Sprint’s server, rather than downloading it to the local blog. That would probably work, but the image goes away from Sprint’s server after a few months. Anyhow, watch this space for updates, if you’re experiencing this problem.

Download it here: http://www.danray.net/sprintpost.zip

TODO:

  • Allow you to supply separate post title and post body
  • Allow you to supply tags, for use with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin

“Sprint Post Wordpress Plugin” has 13 Responses



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  1. On March 22nd, 2006 Weblog Tools Collection » WP plugin: Sprint Post said:

    […] WP plugin: Sprint Post This plugin makes moblogging from Sprint PCS phones really simple. I had written something like this a couple of years ago. It screen-scrapes the Sprint Picture Mail email, downloads the picture to the server, and formats a post to display it. For those that have not tried moblogging or blogging pictures from cell phones, it can become quite the habit and really quite cool. I stopped doing this sometime ago, but the original blog still exists at http://mindfulmusings.net/moblog/ Technorati Tags: moblog sprint wordpress plugin   […]

  2. On April 21st, 2006 Andy said:

    Thanks for the sprint picture mail wordpress plugin. You don’t know how
    nice it is after wandering the web trying to use old ones that haven’t
    been updated since sprint changed the picturemail pages (which
    apparently they do somewhat often). It’s working great for me. The one
    thing I would add, if your interested in updating your documentation, is
    to mention that you may have to create the wp-content/uploads folder,
    and change the permission on it so that the web server can write to the
    directory. This may be obvious to some, but for less savvy folk like
    myself it took me while to figure it out. Just a thought. Anyway,
    thanks for the great plugin.

  3. On April 22nd, 2006 Dan said:

    Docs updated. Thanks, Andy!

    Actually, this uncovered a bug I hadn’t noticed before. Using relative URLs for the image src fails on the comment page, because we’re no longer at the blog’s root directory. I’m travelling this week, but I’ll fix that first thing when I’m back.

  4. On May 18th, 2006 AGIV said:

    Is this currently working? Any update needed?

  5. On May 21st, 2006 Dan said:

    Sorry for the delay; I was travelling.

    As far as I can tell the plugin is working. Are you having trouble with it?

  6. On May 22nd, 2006 AGIV said:

    It doesn’t seem to be working… it posts the sprint email without the picture. Maybe sprint changed its mail format again???

  7. On May 22nd, 2006 AGIV said:

    Ok downloaded again and now works… must have been a wordpress problem or sprintpcs picture mail was acting up..

    Thanks

  8. On May 23rd, 2006 AGIv said:

    Ok it does work but I do get this error alot…

    Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in /home2/*****/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/sprintpost.php on line 41

  9. On May 25th, 2006 Bruce said:

    Very cool indeed. Works great. I have placed it on my test blog and will install it on my real blog this weekend.

  10. On June 22nd, 2006 dave said:

    I installed the sprint post plugin and activated it, and all it does is post this text:

    You have new Picture Mail!
    Click Go/View to see now. http://pictures.sprintpcs.com/?mivt=UEtr415R5z7wH5xYz8Ch&shareName=MMS
    _frsthgl

    What am I doing wrong?

  11. On July 8th, 2006 Mark said:

    I did all the steps and including adding the uploads folder and giving permission for “write”. I then made a google email and set it to use POP

    When I access the wp-mail.php all i get is Error [110].

    Should I use a different email address? I set up an email with godaddy and i get a invalid pop3 error

    help, hehe

  12. On July 8th, 2006 Mark said:

    the godaddy email works like a champ after this fix

    To fix, edit wp-includes/class-pop3.php, and change this line:
    if($this->RFC1939) {
    to this:
    if(!$this->RFC1939) {
    (add exclamation point).

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/5436

  13. On March 17th, 2008 WordPress Plugins Database » Plugin Details » Sprint Post said:

    […] Visit […]