For those who wish to help others but who have limited means to do so Kiva provides an opportunity to give a little (as little as $25) and help people around the world who have business plans to lift themselves up economically. Loans from individuals get pooled as necessary to fund people. I have been very impressed with this system that allows people to help others by using small means to make great things happen.
I was very happy to take the opportunity to take the code written by Connor Boyack and turn it into the Kiva plugin for WordPress so that people can raise the visibility of Kiva by displaying loans in the fundraising stage with a link to donate.
version 1.1 (2/10/2009)
More options over which loans to show
Latest Version 1.2 (2/27/2009)
You can now use a text widget with the shortcode SHOW-KIVA (enclosed in square brackets – []) to display the Kiva plugin in a widgetized sidebar.
Options include:
- Number of posts to show.
- Display format for loan list – Image only displays the image for each loan linked to the donation page, Both displays the image and text information, Text only displays name(linked to the donation page), business, country, and fundraising level/goal for the loan.
- Gender – you can restrict to only show loans for men or loans for women.
- Region – you can show loans only in one of 7 geographic regions.
- Sector – you can only show certain types of loans such as retail or agriculture.
To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Kiva page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later). Place the call show_kiva(); anywhere in your page templates or use [ SHOW-KIVA] in a text widget.
hi David,
firstly great work – thanks so much..
But i cant see how to include it on my sidebar – please see supremepeace.org
the only options i can see are to include the code as you have mentioned above but i cant see how to do that on the Ahimsa theme..
Can you please help..
I apologize. I thought I had written those instructions in at least two places. The way to include it is to add the following code in your page template:
sorry mate – it has to do more with that theme Ahimsa. I can’t get it to load in the sidebar. i’ve edited the sidebar.php and also page.php but neither seem to work.. Any suggestions? thanks
I’ll have to take a look at Ahimsa and see if I have any ideas.
On your comment below – I am planning to add a function that would allow you to display loans you have made.
Don’t worry about the questions – I’m just glad that this is being used.
Try placing “
” on the line right above “”
If you are using widgets and you place the show_kiva call below that line the call will be skipped. Let me know if that does not help.
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Regards
Also will you be making it so we can display what loans we have made like facebook..
p.s. i love your work – sorry for the questions
Hi David,
I’ve tried placing the php call exactly as you suggested to sunirmalya above, but all I get is the php call rendered as text at the top of the sidebar.
Any ideas? I’m just using a normal, non-customisable Kiva widget for the moment.
I have one idea – you are probably placing the call within an HTML section. You would need to surround it with php tags so it would look like this:
”
Let me know if that does not fix it.
David,
Thanks for the quick reply. But did you leave something out? I can’t see anything after “…so it would look like this.”
Sorry – it’s fixed now (I forgot to escape the code).
Thanks David. It works now – but I had to take out the space after the opening < .
One more minor thing: I can only get it to appear at the top of the sidebar. Is there any way to make it appear lower down, like as the 2nd or 3rd item?
Sorry about that – without that space it won’t show up in the comments – same goes for the code below.
If you are using widgets in your sidebar then it only works if you place the code above the widget section – which starts with something like
(or at the end after the widget section – noted by)If you are not using widgets you should be able to place it wherever you like.
OK David, thanks.
I’ve got widgets that I really don’t want to remove, so I guess I’ll go back to using the Kiva widget I had on there before. Not as customisable, but I have more control over placing.
Keep up the good work.
I understand about that. I placed the show_kiva call at the top of my sidebar here because I was unwilling to quit using widgets. I’ve thought about turning this into a widget, but I have not had the time. Thanks to your inspiration I just realized that a shortcode would work. Download the latest version of Kiva (version1.2) and you can place the shortcode “[ SHOW-KIVA ]” (without the spaces) in a text widget.
David, I was able to get the widget to work inside the blog sidebar and also set the settings. But, no loans are being displayed. It says ‘no loans in …”. What am I doing wrong? I love Kiva and have made loans now for a few years. Regards,
Slim
thanks