Pingback Server for TYPO3¶

What does it do?¶

The extension nsvpingbacks enables TYPO3 sites to receive pingbacks from other sites. Admins and editors can manage pingbacks and approve or disapprove them individually. Nsvpingbacks works together with other extensions like tt_news and thus is especially suited for blogs based on TYPO3.

Screenshots¶

Admins set up pingback functionality by including a FE plugin on the pages that should be able to receive pingbacks:

Editors manage pingbacks in a special BE module:

Setting up the FE plugin¶

In order to enable single pages in the TYPO3 site to receive pingbacks the administrator must insert the “Pingbacks” plugin on these pages. Just add a new content element, choose “General Plugin” and select “Pingbacks” on the plugin tab.

The FE plugin both controls the pingback server for this page and displays received pingbacks in FE. The most important configuration is the field “Content Identifier”. This field determines for which kind of dataset the pingbacks will be registered and shown. It should contain “pid” if the extension should assign the pingbacks to the current page as a whole. In order to assign the pingbacks to another dataset that is displayed on this page (like a single news item of the tt_news extension) the “Content Identifier” field must contain the name of the query string parameter which would designate this dataset (e.g. tx_ttnews[tt_news]).

The plugin will display all the pingbacks that have been registered for the identified content if the checkbox “Display pingbacks” is selected. It renders the pingbacks according to the template file chosen in the input field “Template File” (see the example template in EXT:nsvpingbacks/res/pi1_default.tmp and the next section for a reference of the possible markes). The date will be rendered according to the format in the input field “Dateformat” (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php ).

Alias Path for the Pingback Server¶

An eID script will receive and register the pingbacks. Its URI is: /?eID=nsvpingbacks. Pingback clients will normally send pingbacks via a POST request. Often, these POST requests do not work well with the query string parameter eID. Therefore it is necessary to setup a rewrite rule in the .htaccess for this script. Just add these lines to your .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^nsvpingbacks/$ ?eId=nsvpingbacks [L]
</IfModule>

In order to enable the new path of the pingback server it must be assigned in the extension manager. Just choose nsvpingbacks in the list of installed extension and enter the new path (“/nsvpingbacks/”) in the field “Pingback Server Path”.

Simplify the detection of the Pingback Server¶

Wordpress blogs (which will probably send most of the pingbacks) will request the target URI on your page to check whether it is able to receive pingbacks and to find out the URI of the pingback server. First, they will send a HEAD request to check if the HTTP parameter X-Pingbacks is set. If it is not set, they will send a GET request and look for the according link element in the head section of your document.

In both cases the request from wordpress will time out after two seconds. This may be too short for many TYPO3 pages to answer the requests. Therefore, it is necessary to set the X-Pingback parameter in the HTTP header and to speed up the response to HEAD requests. In order to achieve this just add these lines to your .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  Header set X-Pingback http://[your-domain]/nsvpingbacks/
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^HEAD(.*)$
  RewriteRule .* emptyAnswer.html [L]
</IfModule>

And add an empty file with the name “emptyAnswer.html” in the root directory of your TYPO3 system.

Reference¶

Reference of TypoScript options: plugin.tx_nsvpingbacks_pi1.

plugin.tx_nsvpingbacks_pi1 {
    template = fileadming/template/pingbacks.tmpl
    dateformat = m/d/Y – g:i a
    identifier = tx_ttnews[tt_news]
}

1.0.0¶