The Associative Dictionary

What is it?

My second Wordpress widget is a simple one: it adds a dictionary to your site and displays words from it through ajax calls. All the words in the description are links themselves, so you can keep wandering through the words. If a word has no description, a small form is displayed to make one up.

It is not meant to be useful, so it has no search — you can only hope visitors will come up with nice, sarcastic or cryptic descriptions.

I have tried to combine all the necessary code in one file: it generates the widget class, the javascript; it also handles the server calls sent by the javascript. This widget creates a table in the database; in the options you’ll find acheckbox to delete all the entries. I think it’s relatively safe, it strips out all the html and transforms special characters to make it useless for refererspammers.

Extract the php-file and upload it to /wp-content/plugins/widgets. In the options you can set:

  1. widget title
  2. start with a random word or set the word to start with
  3. language (Dutch or English for now)
  4. email address for notification of new words

You can see it in action in my sidebar under “Wanderwords”.

Download

You can download the latest version from the Wordpress Plugins Directory.

7 Comments

president  on July 28th, 2008

i come here, looking for something else
but i like this concept ; i will try it
thanks a lot

Volvagia356  on August 24th, 2008

It’s not working on mine.
It shows up on the sidebar but when I set a word, nothing appears on it.

diana  on September 24th, 2008

Ik heb het zelfde probleem als Volvagia! de Widget (die ik Woordenloos heb genoemd) verschijnt als titel op de sidebar, maar verder niks!

Jeroen Smeets  on September 24th, 2008

Diana, fijn dat je de plugin hebt laten staan, zo kon ik bekijken wat er aan de hand is: je hebt in de map plugins/widgets een oude versie van de plugin staan. Ik denk dat het zal werken als je die weggooit.

Volvagia, thanks to Diana I hope I have figured this thing out. She has an old version of the plugin in her plugins/widgets folder, which generates an error message. Could you check if this applies to your plugins folder as well?

The Associative Dictionary Widget - WP Plugin Archive  on October 10th, 2008

[...] The Associative Dictionary Widget von Jeroen Smeets fügt ein Wörterbuch in die Sidebar ein und zeigt ein Wort mit [...]

max  on October 18th, 2008

Pretty cool and fun. What happens when the same word is added for the word? i.e. have: add ‘have’. It looks like it gets stuck. Perhaps update plugin so that identical word can not be entered?

Jeroen Smeets  on October 18th, 2008

Hi Max, before your comment arrived I saw you adding the word itself as lemma. It happens all the time and doesn’t help to grow the dictionary. I’ll think of some extra rules, probably in the settings.

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