I wrote this article in English even though this blog is usually written in German, so don’t look for other English posts.

About the Plugin

Factolex is an Austrian start-up that provides an “fact lexicon”, consisting from short sentences that describe all terms you can imagine in the two languages English and German. Everybody can add terms and facts, much like on Wikipedia. Additionally, a Factolex bot scouts the web for new terms and facts.

Factolex also sports an API that can be used to search and retrieve terms and facts. I used this API to create a simple plugin that spices up my tag pages here on my blog. I simply check if a tag is also available as a term on Factolex. If this is the case, I show the facts on my tag page.

The plugin can of course also be used in other ways, like showing one fact per tag directly below an article – or whatever else you can think of!

This plugin was developed independently of Factolex. Factolex created their own WordPress Plugin, Factolex Glossary, which is much simpler to use and doesn’t require any development skills.

Usage

This plugin requires some developer skills!

To use the plugin, some code has to be included in your template files. If you don’t know how themes work, go to the Template Hierarchy page on WordPress’ developer site, which gives you an idea.

I don’t want to post duplicate information on this blog and on the WordPress plugin site, therefore the exact code usage can on the “Installation”-tab of the Plugin’s WordPress site: Factolex WordPress Plugin

You can see a live implementation on many of my tag pages, like this one.

Version History

v0.3
Detects and reports if allow_fopen_url is set to false (problem in PHP5)
Suppresses PHP warning message, if Factolex-server is down
Doesn’t start endless loop if no data is returned from server because of an error

v0.2
Make more efficient, add new ways to load data (byTermId, byTermName), add new way to get data (getArray).

v0.1
Initial release.