PicoSuggestedLinks

A plugin for the Pico CMS to support a "Recommended Links" module like many blogs have.

You can define a list of links as "Recommended Links", which this plugin will display in a module, randomized every time, a maximum of 6 links with images.

Example:

Installation

1. Drop this PicoSuggestedLinks.php file into your Pico plugin directory.
2. Add the following configuration to your Pico config file (see next section).
3. Add a line into your Pico theme's template file (see the section after next).
4. Edit your list of suggested links (see below).

Config

PicoSuggestedLinks uses a few configuration variables. Here is an example using all of them.

$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.enabled' ] = true;
$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.filename' ] = 'suggestedLinks.txt'; // use different extension as default .md files
$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.default' ] = 'on'; // on means you have to specifically turn off on pages if needed
$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.analytics' ] = true; // google analytics
$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.title' ] = 'Recommended for you';
$config[ 'PicoSuggestedLinks.fallbackImage' ] = '/themes/default/logo.png';

PicoSuggestedLinks.enabled
This enables or disables the plugin completely.

PicoSuggestedLinks.filename The file that stores the list of suggested links. See the section below for formatting of this file. It should be stored in your content directory, root level.

PicoSuggestedLinks.default This determines if default should be on or off. Your individual pages can still set it to on or off locally on those particular pages using the meta setting. Also see the Theme change section below on what you have to do with template files for the module to appear.

PicoSuggestedLinks.analytics If your site uses Google Analytics, turning this on will fire a custom Google analytics event on link clicks.

PicoSuggestedLinks.title Title text of the section of Recommended links.

PicoSuggestedLinks.fallbackImage The fallback image to use for when a suggested link doesn't have an image defined in the meta data.

Theme change

You will have to add a single line to your theme template file, on pages where you want the module to appear:

{{ suggested_links }}

Editing list of suggested links

Simply create a file named suggestedLinks.txt (or a different name if you used a different one in configuration above) under your content directory. This file should simply contain 1 link per line, without the domain, as follow:

/folder/page-1
/another-folder/page-2
/some-root-page

I have personally modified Pico Edit with functionality to edit this directly from the editor, but I have not committed it as a change into their repo. I can do this if there is a demand for it.

Caching

PicoSuggestedLinks utilize the same caching directory that your Pico is set up to use (for Twig). For example, if you have the following cache configuration with Pico right now:

$config['twig_config'] = array(
    'cache' => dirname(__FILE__).'/../cache', // To enable Twig caching change this to a path to a writable directory
    'autoescape' => false,                    // Auto-escape Twig vars or not
    'debug' => false                          // Enable Twig debug or not
);

Your Pico CMS is set up to store cache files to a cache directory under your Pico root. This allows Pico to cache files and load pages much faster.

Similarly, PicoSuggestedLinks will use the same setting, and store a cache file into it (named suggestedLinksCache.php, which will allow suggested links to load much faster, because it will not have to parse every single file on your list of links every time.