Usability Question du Jour

Say I’m building a website that deals with data from other websites (social and professional networks, etc), and I want users to be able to enter in their existing profile info into of the application. I can’t just ask for their current username (e.g. http://facebook.com/), because some of these websites do not have very friendly URLs (e.g. http://www.spoke.com/info//) and these may confuse the user. Our mock-up implementation looks like this:

usability_q_1

In the example above, “Sign Up For” send the user to the specified site’s sign up page, and the form element is their ID. It changes based on the site in question, and I don’t think it quite works. What troubles me most (I’m not in love with it being overlaid on the text) is the language, but none of it is something I can’t live without. “Finish this URL” makes it sound like a game, or look like a CAPTCHA, neither of which is what we want. So, UI/UX/Usability gurus: How would you do it? Comments are open.

Using WordPress Functions Outside of WordPress

I’m working on a project that requires the use of WordPress functions (mainly creating users and such) outside of the WordPress installation. After some Google searches of varying specificity, I’ve found a method that appears to work for both WordPress and WordPress Mu. I’ve reproduced it here for my own purposes, as well as yours.

WordPress.org member oranfry posted the following helpful bit of code, to be inserted in the top of the wp-load.php, right after the tag:

global $domain, $path, $base, $admin_page_hooks, $ajax_results, $all_links, $allowedposttags, $allowedtags, $authordata, $bgcolor, $cache_categories, $cache_lastcommentmodified, $cache_lastpostdate, $cache_lastpostmodified, $cache_userdata, $category_cache, $class, $comment, $comment_cache, $comment_count_cache, $commentdata, $current_user, $day, $debug, $descriptions, $error, $feeds, $id, $is_apache, $is_IIS, $is_macIE, $is_winIE, $l10n, $locale, $link, $m, $map, $max_num_pages, $menu, $mode, $month, $month_abbrev, $monthnum, $more, $multipage, $names, $newday, $numpages, $page, $page_cache, $paged, $pagenow, $pages, $parent_file, $preview, $previousday, $previousweekday, $plugin_page, $post, $post_cache, $post_default_category, $post_default_title, $post_meta_cache, $postc, $postdata, $posts, $posts_per_page, $previousday, $request, $result, $richedit, $single, $submenu, $table_prefix, $targets, $timedifference, $timestart, $timeend, $updated_timestamp, $urls, $user_ID, $user_email, $user_identity, $user_level, $user_login, $user_pass_md5, $user_url, $weekday, $weekday_abbrev, $weekday_initial, $withcomments, $wp, $wp_broken_themes, $wp_db_version, $wp_did_header, $wp_did_template_redirect, $wp_file_description, $wp_filter, $wp_importers, $wp_plugins, $wp_taxonomies, $wp_the_query, $wp_themes, $wp_object_cache, $wp_query, $wp_queries, $wp_rewrite, $wp_roles, $wp_similiesreplace, $wp_smiliessearch, $wp_version, $wpcommentspopupfile, $wpcommentsjavascript, $wpdb;

and in wp-settings.php replace all replace all occurrences of =& with =. Then include wp-load.php in your external file, and (in my case) wp-includes/registration.php. You can now call WordPress functions such as wp_insert_user.