Chess Game Viewer WordPress Plugin

Last week I quietly released my second chess plugin for WordPress and I wanted to make a quick post to tell you a little about it. You may remember I tested out a plugin a while back that allowed you to display chess games in your WordPress posts. While that plugin worked okay, I wasn’t impressed and was looking for a way to customize the chess board interface. Unfortunately there wasn’t a WordPress plugin like that available so I decided to make one myself.

I found a great open source javascript called JSPgnViewer that give me a very functional PGN game viewer to build on. For those of you unfamiliar with “PGN,” that is the standard format (notation) that chess games get saved as. It is basically just text that shows the moves of a game. With the heavy lifting of creating a PGN viewer already finished, I was able to focus on building the customizable skins for the chess pieces and boards. Another feature that I am pretty happy with is the ability to add your games through a WordPress quicktag. All you have to do is click on this button in the HTML side of your WordPress editor and paste in your code. More information about the chess game viewer plugin is available here.

I will wrap this up with a quick demonstration of the plugin in action. Here a few of the games I have enjoyed recently:

In the game above I was down a two major pieces and preparing for a loss until the water parted and I ended with a nice combination.

I almost took a draw in the game above at move 27, but then I saw a way to get my second knight involved to force checkmate. Move 30 puts my knight in harms way as a cocky way to finish the game. I am a jerk that way.

Sometimes your opponent just doesn’t want to win and they let you checkmate them with just a single knight.

Above is a terrible move at 27! Luckly, I still had a little life left. I love this ending.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.