Netflix Widget for WordPress

posted June 9th, 2008

This post goes out to all the wordpress users out there who wanted to use Albert Banks’ Netflix Plugin for WordPress but were frustrated at the plugin not being accessible as a sidebar widget. I added some code to widgetize the plugin that I adapted from this goodreads plugin. If you want you can download what I wrote and then you too can tell the world more than they ever wanted to know about your DVD rental habits.

If you look at the code and see what I added (in the section commented “wigetized” [sic]), you’ll notice that I’m shunning CSS markup for good old table formatting. I also changed a line under “switch display type”to make the widget look pretty in the sidebar. I’ve got it working in the sidebar here if you’re looking for an example of how it will look.

After you ftp the plugin into your wordpress install, you’ll still need to change the Netflix plugin settings in the wordpress backend. To make the table formatting work I have each entry start with a [tr] tag and end with a [/tr] tag. See below:

Also, you’ll need to go to the widgets menu to add the Netflix widget that should appear there.

Maybe you’re thinking that somebody should already have done this by now. You’re right. Except it’s missing. Back in 2006 Chris Stanley over at ongoingprocess.net announced he had made a widget to work with Albert Banks’ as yet unwidgetized Netflix plugin. I searched for it in vain at his site but the link he provided had become broken at some point and was never fixed. Perhaps Stanley will dig it up someday and make it available again. Until then, you can try this out. Hope it works for you.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

“Netflix Widget for WordPress” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

danetidwell

July 5, 2008 at 4:56 PM

The link to the plugin doesn’t work. Has it changed?

Thanks!
Dane

aharon

July 6, 2008 at 7:56 AM

Fixed!

hmbscully

October 13, 2008 at 1:37 PM

What version of WP are you using? I cannot get this to work for anything. The widget shows up and I add it in the widget manager, but all that comes through is:

Viewing

with none of my movies listed.

Aharon

October 13, 2008 at 2:04 PM

hmbscully: make sure to set the netflix configuration for this plugin in your wordpress admin. You’ll need to know your Netflix ID. Also, you’ll need to use the ‘tr’ html table row tags for the before/after part of the configuration.