TFD Word of the Day

TheFreeDictionary.com provides some code that webmasters can add to websites, in order to publish the word of the day on their sites. This plugin just adapts that code for simple use within wordpress.

Warning: geek-speak ahead.

The plugin uses curl on the server side to retrieve the word-of-the-day. It caches the result, then embeds it into the generate page. On subsequent page requests, the plugin uses the cached result. The cache life is 120 minutes.

The content is cached in a file in a “cache” subdirectory of the wp-content directory. You probably don’t need to concern yourself with the cache.

There is a wotd.css file included in the widget. You can make styling changes there. Any changes you make there will be overwritten if you download and install a newer version of the widget.

You can also style the widget elements with your own stylesheet. To do this you need to know CSS and also how the widget is rendered.

The widget is normally rendered in a widget container, which is styled with these css classes: widget-container widget_tfdwotd . Therefore in a css sheet you might use something like this:

.widget-container.widget_tfdwotd { …. }

Within that container, the structure of the rendered HTML is:

<h3> widget Title </h3> <div class=’tfd-wotd’> <h3>word</h3> <table> … </table> </div>

Therefore, you may wish to use these CSS selectors:

.widget-container.widget_tfdwotd div.tfd-wotd { ... } .widget-container.widget_tfdwotd div.tfd-wotd > table { ... } .widget-container.widget_tfdwotd div.tfd-wotd > table td { ... } .widget-container.widget_tfdwotd { ... }

No.