Anyone who’s familiar with Chinese websites - especially Chinese chat forums (BBSs) - will know all about those crazy little animated emoticons. Yeah sure, you’ve seen emoticons in your MSN messenger before, but Chinese emoticons are especially messed up.

So messed up in fact, that I decided I just had to install this plugin:

CoolCode.cn Emoticons Plugin from Xenium and Andot.

Download Plugin directly (Zip)

Note: Normally I wouldn’t link directly to a file on someone else’s server, but as it’s hosted on a Chinese webpage, it might be impossible to find otherwise. Hope that’s ok guys.

Here’s a preview of the emoticons listed:
Comments Emoticons wordpress plugin

Installation:

  • Upload the Emoticons folder to your plugins directory.
  • Find this code:
    <p>
    <textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="70" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea>
    </p>
  • And just above that, insert this:
    <?php
    if (class_exists('emotions')) {
         emotions::bar();
    }
    ?>
  • Go to plugin management page in Wordpress, and click Activate Plugin

Issues:

For all the emoticons to display properly (all 60+ of them!) you need a fairly wide text column. Or else it might push your sidebar to the bottom, as it did with mine.

One workaround for narrow text areas:

I just chose the best 15 emoticons, and deleted the rest from the images folder included in the emoticon plugin directory. Maybe 60 is a bit much anyway… In any case, they now display sans probleme on just above my comments box (see below).

Good stuff.

UPDATED WORKAROUND: Reader Evitc provided this solution of modifying the CSS in the comments.

I’ve been running this one on my much neglected Chinese blog for months now, but I hadn’t bothered to install it over here.

I think it looks good. And they’re kinda fun too. Click the Comments link to test it out.

Incidentally, my WordPress theme, Hoofei, was created by a Chinese developer as well. Good to see China representin’ (far) East side when it comes to WordPress!

Has anyone else spent any time venturing into the wacky world of Chinese web development?

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