Chess Plugins for WordPress
[Update: After not being overly impressed with the available chess WordPress plugins available, I decided to create my own. If you are looking for a way to view chess games in WordPress, check out my Chess Game Viewer Control Panel which allows you to customize the board and pieces that you show in your posts!]
I have been playing chess online a bit more lately and have been looking for ways to incorporate chess into my blog a bit more. I don’t know what form that will take, but one of the things I have been experimenting with is a WordPress plugin called “Chess by Blog.” This WordPress Plugin allows you to paste a chess game in PGN format into your web posts. For example, the example below shows a game I played last week.
Here is my initial results from trying to use the Chess By Blog WordPress plugin. The plugin seems to work after a little bit of trial and error. For example, I had to manually surround my PGN code with the div class of “CBB-board” to get the game to show up. Perhaps I am missing something. In the HTML tab there is a “Chess By Blog” option that I couldn’t get working, either. I am in Safari right now so maybe I should try it in Firefox. It looks like you can create custom styles and themes for your board, which might be fun to play with. I will add to this post more as I figure out more features/problems with the plugin.
Just so I can leave you with a sample chess game, here is an example using my own Chess WordPress plugin (not Chess by Blog). Enjoy…
This was a fun game. I started out aggressive, but played sloppy leaving myself down several pawns and then a knight. Luckily I was bailed out in the end because my opponent didn’t see the checkmate coming. I plugged the game into the computer at move 37 and was surprised the computer gave me a draw despite being down so much material. I find that some of the most enjoyable games are the one’s where victory is snatched from the clutches of defeat. Of course it is never fun to be the person on the other side of the board when this happens.
