Chess Teaching » Plugins

Oops!!!

Chess Teacher — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:16:56 +0000

I have upgraded to WordPress 2.8, but it seems that this resulted in some problems with the chess diagrams and replayable games.
I’m trying to solve this.

Update: The problem has been solved.
I had to adapt the Show-FEN plugin. A new version of the Show-FEN plugin v1.4 can be downloaded here.

Sociable

Chess Teacher — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:03:33 +0000

I have installed the Sociable plugin for WordPress. This plugin adds the little social media buttons at the end of the posts. If you like this site or this post you can use this buttons to share the post on your social networks like StumbleUpon. I have selected a very limited number of social networks. Please tell me if I have missed your favorite one.

In addition to this plugin I also have added a StumbleUpon button at the rightside navigation bar, but you can also use the link in this post.

Another Finishline adaption

Chess Teacher — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:21:06 +0000

I noted that the comments on the about page have been disappeared so I decided to make them reappear again.

Therefor I have added the following code to the Page template.

Now the comments are back, but maybe I have to reconsider at which pages comments are allowed and use a plugin like Move Comments to move the comments to a better (and less template dependent) place.

Show-FEN plugin 1.3

Chess Teacher — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:28:04 +0000

The Show-FEN plugin v1.3 can be downloaded here.
In addition to the original functionality the letterx x, o and v may be used.

Ater downloading and unzipping the plugin to an appropriate directory you still have to change the line

$path = “http://your.domain.name/plugindir/”;

to something which corresponds to the directory in which the pictures of the chess pieces can be found.
In the first post of the Show-FEN plugin you will find more information.

Chess Exercises

Chess Teacher — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:37:57 +0000

At this place a new chess problem has been presented to you during each visit. The purpose of these chess diagrams was to improve your chess skills.
But there were two problems with these diagrams. First of all it takes a lot of bandwidth, because for each visit the site has to be changed. And secondly I didn’t add a difficulty level to the diagrams, which made it less usefull.
The initial purpose was to give a demonstration of the PGN plugin, but a lot of other examples can now be found on this site.
For the future I’m looking at a solution in which I can use normal PGN-files, for example with the DHTML chess viewer. As a kind of experiment you can try to solve the 1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate on a rather large chess board. If this turns out to be working fine I will probably use this to add more chess exercises in the future.

In addition nowadays a chess tactics server exists that has more exercises and the difficulty level is included. Therefor I decided that the best thing to do at this place is to point you to this chess tactics server.

If some of the exercises turn out to be rather difficult it may be a good idea to continue with the chess lessons and try them later.

Fen WordPress Plugin

Chess Teacher — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:46:33 +0000

The first version of the Show-fen plugin for WordPress is finished.

It is based on the code for SPHPBlog that can be downloaded at Schaakpraat and can be used to display chess diagrams by only inserting the FEN string within the and tags. The circle at the upper right corner is used to indicate the move color.

For example by entering 8/4p3/3p4/3k4/8/5N1K/2Q5/8 w – - – - the following mate in three problem is displayed.

A description of this FEN notation can be found in Wikipedia.

A FEN “record” defines a particular game position, all in one text line and using only the ASCII character set.

A FEN record contains 6 fields. The separator between fields is a space. The fields are:

Piece placement (from white’s perspective). Each rank is described, starting with rank 8 and ending with rank 1; within each rank, the contents of each square are described from file a through file h. White pieces are designated using upper-case letters (”KQRBNP”), Black by lowercase (”kqrbnp”). Blank squares are noted using digits 1 through 8 (the number of blank squares), and “/” separate ranks.
Active color. “w” means white moves next, “b” means black.
Castling availability. If neither side can castle, this is “-”. Otherwise, this has one or more letters: “K” (White can castle kingside), “Q” (White can castle queenside), “k” (Black can castle kingside), and/or “q” (Black can castle queenside).
En passant target square in algebraic notation. If there’s no en passant target square, this is “-”. If a pawn has just made a 2-square move, this is the position “behind” the pawn.
Halfmove clock: This is the number of halfmoves since the last pawn advance or capture. This is used to determine if a draw can be claimed under the fifty move rule.
Fullmove number: The number of the full move. It starts at 1, and is incremented after Black’s move