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Dealing with the bib2html WordPress plugin

What about sharing your publications in an elegant way by using only a bibtex file as source? Check mine or Javier Campos‘ to see what I mean. You just need to use WordPress and the bib2html plugin. It’s pretty simple, but there are a few caveats.

First, install the bib2html plugin from WordPress using the standard procedure, directly from WordPress. Activate it. Now you just need to enter a special bibtex tag in any page or post and provide a bibtex source (local or remote).

Here is the source of my publications page (remove the asterisk in [*bibtex, just added to prevent that bib2html processed it) :

Conference Papers

[*bibtex file=http://svn.plopez.info/website/publications/pablo.bib allow=inproceedings]

Journal Articles

[*bibtex file=http://svn.plopez.info/website/publications/pablo.bib allow=article]

Others

[*bibtex file=http://svn.plopez.info/website/publications/pablo.bib deny=article,inproceedings]

The process is pretty simple, however there are two main problems with bib2html.

  1. The plugin is not working after installation: If, after installation, nothing seems to work and you receive a bunch of warnings of this kind: "Warning: fopen(..../wp-content/plugins/bib2html/data/yourbib.bib.cached.bib) failed to open stream... on line 184", then probably the data directory is missing. If so, create it (via SSH or however).
  2. The publications page does not change after  the bibtex file is updated (e.g. when adding a new publication): This plugin uses caching: I haven't researched how it works (it might reflect your changes after a given time), but if you want to see changes immediately just delete the cache file at .../wp-content/plugins/bib2html/data/yourbib.bib.cached.bib)  and refresh the page.