Order of the Bath

While developing the new church website (which, by the way, is now online) I came across a couple of plugins that automatically link a bible verse reference to the text. I was reminded to write about it today, ironically, by a spam which linked to a very crude online bible using free web space from Blogspot. I am not sure which version has been bootlegged.

eBibleicious

eBibleicious was the first plugin I investigated. It links to eBible.com and seemed to be simple and efficient but for some reason does not work at all if the visitor is on Virgin Broadband. bweaver.net has a review with some screen shots which show what could have been, but the developer blog has been quiet since March 2008 so I think it has all but died.

The Holy Scripturizer

The Holy Scripturizer is a plugin that I found later. It is also not well advertised and the developer blog has not been updated since june 2008 but perhaps there is nothing more to do; it works fine on WP 2.7. There are a lot of the same ideas as eBibleicious using the ESV website as source, but has the added benefit of multiple versions in link only (i.e. not popup) mode. The NRSV comes from Oremus Bible Browser which is the one we normally use. Almost every English language version is covered and a lot of others as well, mostly via the Bible Gateway. It parses most standard bible references and is working brilliantly on the web site with virtually no training needed.

[Update 7 Jul 2017]

Wow, yes, I am still using it!

And all was going well – some time ago I modified it to v1.8.5 to a) support NRSV-UK from bible.oremus.org and b) change target=”_new” to target=”_blank” to conform to current practice. This is ok right up to WordPress v4.8. However we migrated servers recently to one that supports PHP7, though we have downgraded it a bit to v5.6 because of other problems. This plugin started to give us grief—it was blocking login and whenever it was activated it said

The plugin generated 3 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin.

It took a lot of effort to track down what the problem was but it turned out to be the encoding of the main PHP file—it was UTF8 with BOM (Byte Order Mark) and it was the latter which was causing the problem as it was pushing the BOM 3 characters out before the headers and causing the error. So I have removed the BOM from the file and all is well again. I suspect that it was self-inflicted and I had edited it at some time using Windows Textedit which is known to do this sort of thing.

In the process of trying to trace the problem I also created a stripped down version which I have called RJP-BibleRef. This is pure plug and play, it requires no options setting but it ONLY generates NRSV-UK links. You are welcome to give any of them a try.

The Original The Holy Scripturizer v1.8.3
My Modified The Holy Scripturizer v1.8.5
The Stripped Down RJP-BibleRef v1.0

This entry was posted on 2 Jan 2009 at 18:01 by Rick and is filed under ChurchTech, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.