Aug 10, 2011

Introducing Social, a WordPress Plugin

With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers, we tweet and post to Facebook when we publish new posts. In a write-once-publish-many-times kind of web, commenting happens outside blogs even more than on the posts themselves. That’s why we worked with the fine folks at Crowd Favorite to create a plugin for WordPress called Social.

Social for WordPress

Social is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. Through the use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

Through Social, you can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments. Social polls Twitter and Facebook periodically for new comments about your posts, and adds them as comments when it finds a URL reference.

Social for WordPress

Lots of people use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web. Social lets commenters log in and leave a comment using their preferred social identity. They can also publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account from your blog.

Social intentionally has a broad name. It handles a lot of socially bits in your blog from broadcasting to content aggregating. There are a bunch of other nice things about the plugin, though:

  • Automatically adds Twitter hover cards to any Twitter username you drop into posts or that show up in comments
  • Let’s you filter between blog comments, tweets, Facebook comments, and trackbacks
  • Handles comment thread layout intelligently so you don’t get microscopic widths after four or five replies
  • Let’s you manually check for social comments from each blog post edit page, or paste in a tweet URL for a comment if you like
  • Easily customizable design by creating your own templates for the plugin

Want to take Social for a spin? Hey, Madge. You’re soaking in it. We’ve got it installed right here in the MailChimp blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Social. We tried lots of other plugins that do similar things, but none of them quite fit the bill. So we made our own, and we’re releasing it free for everyone else to enjoy.

UPDATE: Alex King of Crowd Favorite, the development mastermind behind Social, has addressed a lot of the technical details and the roadmap for the plugin over on his blog.

Download Social for WordPress

Posted By

Aarron

Discussion

  • logicalthings

    Seems like an elegant solution to the dilemma of “which 3rd party auth do we get in bed with.” Does the plugin chronologically interlace comments left from different social networks into the single “5 Replies” tab in your screenshot? I’m also curious what the performance hit will be.

    08.10.2011

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    • logicalthings

      Right, I see now that it does interlace the replies (couldn’t tell since mine was the first comment). Gah! Is there any way to either separate retweets into their own tab or allow folks to toggle them on/off? It makes for a rather redundant, un-scanable comment feed, IMO.

      08.10.2011

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      • Aarron

        That’s useful feedback, @logicalthings. We have been thinking about offering an option to turn off retweets. We’ll consider that as we work on future versions.

        08.10.2011

    • vkasshu

      @Aaron
      I Like the plugin and got the same doubt about server load and performance. Is that a problem to worry if I use this plugin?

      08.12.2011

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      • Peter

        What happened to the Google + plans?

        02.29.2012

      • aarron

        It’s still on our radar, but we’re still waiting for Google to release a more complete version of their API.

        03.01.2012

      • craig

        any update on the google+ integration plans?

        02.03.2013

      • John

        Hi Craig, Not at this point as Google has yet to release an API that would help make this a reality. So for now, watching and waiting.

        02.04.2013

      • marinXchange

        I am surprised it’s taking so long. There are other WP plugins that offer Google authentication. WordPress Social Login (and comments) is just one of them. Thank you for considering this, as an increasing # of users are coming from Google (which is much more than G+, it includes gmail of course).

        03.02.2013

  • wkeving

    This looks pretty sweet! Definitely want to check it out!

    08.10.2011

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  • Brad Z

    Just got a “The plugin does not have a valid header” error message when installing the Social wordpress plugin: http://d.pr/VAKh #fail

    08.10.2011

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  • unmatchedstyle

    oooh, so very nice of you guys to make this & release it free. This is why everyone should love Mailchimp!

    08.10.2011

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  • Bryce

    Looking forward to trying this out. A couple of questions, does it work with Facebook pages and do you need to use the publish method to have it all work or can use just use the sign-in and comment features of the plugin?

    08.10.2011

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    • Aarron

      Yeah, we will be tackling Facebook Page connections in the very next version. We sure as heck want that feature for ourselves too!

      Right now you can just connect Social to a Facebook Profile. You don’t have to use the broadcast features of Social to make the commenting stuff work. So long as blog post URLs find their way onto Facebook and Twitter, the plugin can sniff them out and aggregate into posts.

      08.10.2011

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      • Bryce

        Sounds perfect, thanks!

        08.11.2011

      • Janelle

        I’ll put my hand up for connections FB pages too!

        08.11.2011

      • Jflower

        The plugin is working great so glad I found this. I am looking forward to being able to post to my facebook page!

        08.16.2011

      • Canton

        At the moment I’m using the facebook app RSS Graffiti to syndicate my WP blog posts to my facebook page (not profile.) Are you folks familiar with RSS Graffiti? If so, can you compare/contrast? I’d love to dump RSS Graffiti which I’m using for about a dozen WP sites and switch to this all-in-one “Social” plugin (once it supports posting to pages not just profiles.)

        05.14.2012

      • Aarron

        That’s not one we’re familiar with so can’t offer much comparison.

        05.15.2012

      • Srini

        I have installed this plugin on my blog. When I click sign in using facebook / twitter it redirects to 404 error page. How to fix it ?

        08.07.2012

      • Srini

        Yeah Aarron. I saw that earlier. Thank you for the support .

        08.08.2012

      • Srini

        Can you please tell me how I change the width of the comment box that appears after a comment is added ? I have to adjust it slightly or I miss out a part of the last word in every line. help me fix it please

        08.08.2012

      • Noah's Dad

        Does this mean if I use social I can keep doing things as I’ve always done them (writing the post, and than manually sharing the link to my facebook page) and social will be able to find and aggregate the comments just by the url? If so that would be epic! I don’t like having any other app post to the fb page for me. You don’t get near the newsfeed impressions as when you do when you post yourself. Even the official fb plug in shares this problem. I would have though their plug in would have been the exception, but it wasn’t.

        08.21.2012

      • Aarron

        Yup, you can manually post if you like and Social will jog out to Facebook and Twitter to find comments for you.

        08.22.2012

      • Noah's Dad

        Thanks for the reply. I’m not seeing this work on my end, at least not the way I’m thinking it should. In my most recent post I saw there was an option to retrive social comment, so I selected that option. It found several of the twitter mentions of the link, but none of the facebook ones. (There were a lot of comments on Facebook.) I’m assuming this is supposed to be automatically, and supposed to include Facebook.

        Is there a better place to post this question? (In the WordPress forums maybe?) I dont’ want to clutter up your comments with questions. :)

        Does the plug in go back to older posts and bring in comments as well?

        And for some reason the social sign ins aren’t appearing. Looking forward to getting this up and running. I think this is going to be great for our community!

        08.22.2012

  • C47

    What about an option for the commenter to subscribe to your MailChimp list?

    08.10.2011

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    • Aarron

      @C47 I like the way you talk. Um, yeah. We should totally do that. Adding to our to-do list.

      08.10.2011

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    • Aarron

      Twitter makes finding your API key a little confusing. Go to https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new and sign in with your Twitter credentials. You’ll be “creating an app”, which is really just creating a connection point for an app to connect to your Twitter account. Fill out the form with a name for your app (ex: “Social for WordPress”), your blog URL, etc. That will generate a consumer API key for you to drop into Setting > Social in WordPress.

      08.10.2011

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  • maryannarch

    Is to possible to connect my Page instead of my “facebook account” (if I understand things correctly, and I might not, but am really liking the possibilities of this plug-in. Nice work!

    08.10.2011

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  • brathell

    Looks great, can’t wait to take it for a spin on my own blog. Love that you guys are always dreaming up something new.

    08.10.2011

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  • Mary Ann Archibald

    I love that this gives people the *option* to post it to either social site. Very nice indeed. I can disconnect a couple of other plug-ins now, I think. Still wondering about the api business though? :)

    08.10.2011

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    • Aarron

      See my reply to @maryannarch above for API instructions.

      08.10.2011

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  • Gary

    I notice that the download at WordPress.org Plugins note a last updated date of 2010-5-23 for this plugin (I’m sure this is some sort of date error). Look forward to trying this Plugin.

    08.10.2011

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  • Jarrod Skeggs

    I like it a lot from what I see here. Can’t wait to get it implemented and see how it works for me and my clients.

    08.10.2011

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    • wkeving

      If you didn’t catch it yet, they don’t currently have page posting, just profile posting. But they’re working on it according to the reply.

      08.11.2011

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  • pbassham

    Love it.

    And since you are this far, can you make a subscription widget that nicely integrates Mailchimp, twitter, one-click Facebook page ‘like’ button- that includes an option to display followers in each network? That would be very awesome.

    08.10.2011

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    • Aarron

      Hmm, that’s kind of a cool idea. We’ll consider it.

      08.11.2011

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    • twitter_MichaelZed

      Replying to my own with Twitter login.

      Twitter authorization returns an error message “This form will be sent in a way that is not secure. Are you sure you want to send it?” I let it send anyway. When I get back here, there’s no feedback indicating whether the authorization was successful. I can’t tell whether I’m signed in with my Twitter ID.

      08.10.2011

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      • twitter_davevonbieker

        Same problem here. Any ideas on how to make this warning go away? It happens on my blog, too and it raised a red flag for me. It happened when I tried to authenticate Twitter to set it up in the first place, and I was a bit concerned. Why the security warning?

        09.03.2011

  • Varemenos

    Seems great, i didn’t get the chance to test it yet cause I’m away from home.
    I saw you get the option to separate the chats by service and i was wondering if I use disqus for my ‘blog’ will this plugin use disqus as the ‘blog’ chat or will it load WordPress’ default one?

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      Social is not meant to be used with other commenting plugins like Disqus.

      08.11.2011

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    • monty cassel

      Will it play nicely with the commentluv and disqus plugins? It sounds fantastic if not sure I wil let you know after I install it thanks mailchimp!

      08.11.2011

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      • Aarron

        Hey, Monty. Nope, Social is not compatible with other social commenting plugins. We built this plugin because the others didn’t quite do things the way we’d like them to.

        08.11.2011

      • vkasshu

        Agreed ! I like the way it integrate.

        How about integrating rich text editor atleast with a few and basic tools?

        08.12.2011

  • josemv

    Nice, very nice. Was about to ask if it aggregates URL shortened with hootsuite’s shortening service but you made it clear that you are not yet sure about that.
    Is it in your roadmap ? What about aggregating yourls.org shortening ?

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      Social does look at some shortened URLs when doing its searches for comments, but not entirely sure what shorteners we’re reading right now. We’ll definitely want to be as comprehensive as we can be with those queries so I suspect we’ll revisit that issue in the near future.

      08.11.2011

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  • arabsciences

    Any chance to have it supporting Arabic language and RTL style ??

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      It’s not on our roadmap right now, but internationalization is something we might consider in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.

      08.11.2011

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      • twitter_danielCK

        Your plugin has internationalized strings, but doesn’t load the textdomain, which seems like a very strange omission considering the code seems otherwise to be very high quality.

        I got the plugin to load my translated .mo file simply by adding this line to the end of social.php, before the last ‘}’

        load_plugin_textdomain(‘social’, false, ‘social/’);

        09.29.2011

      • Stefan de Vries

        Would it be possible to release the .mo and .po files for this plugins, so translation becomes easier? Thanks.

        12.11.2011

  • jjelenbaas

    Great WP plugin, with Social you are really giving something valuable to the community! Keep up the good work! #mailchimp #wordpress #plugin

    08.11.2011

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  • mediaburst

    Nice looking plugin, of course I’m only making this comment to see what the end user experience is like.

    08.11.2011

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  • alialtugkoca

    This is great plugin but is it possible to use our own Facebook and Twitter applications instead of Mailchimp’s applications? Mailchimps asks too many permissions it could push people out. Also every blog wants to communicate with its own community and there is a trust issue.

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      Not sure I totally follow, but Social works with a custom proxy we built to connect to Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t connect with other apps right now.

      08.11.2011

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      • alialtugkoca

        sorry i made it a little complex. Simply, when commenter clicked to sign in with facebook it authenticaticate with Mailchimp’s Facebook application. I want to redirect to my Facebook application which i created on facebook. Is it possible to configure plugin like this? Thanks

        08.11.2011

      • Aarron

        Not with the current version of the plugin, no.

        08.11.2011

  • Sarah Arrow

    This looks really interesting but to move across means I lose the networking aspect that I have with Comment Luv. Will you be integrating that in a later edition?

    08.11.2011

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  • Jebb

    I’m currently using Intense Debate for comments, but this looks pretty awesome, especially with the updates y’all are working on for future releases. Thanks for making this available!

    -JG

    08.11.2011

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  • jonmrich

    What does this do to comments on old posts? Will it import those comments into this format? Will it also pull in the social media mentions on old posts automatically?

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      Social will look for comments on old posts when you set it up, but you’ll find it might not find many as Twitter search returns data on only a limited time frame. You can always use the manual search button at the bottom of a post edit page to run a query for social comments too.

      08.11.2011

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  • Coral

    I assume I need WordPress.org to be able to use ‘Social’? Looks a brilliant idea by the way.

    08.11.2011

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    • Aarron

      Yup, this plugin is currently only for WordPress.org users.

      08.11.2011

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  • landsharkz

    Another good reason to update our WP components. Thanks MailChimp! Have another banana for being so clever :)

    08.11.2011

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  • LuckySocialCeo

    testing 1,2,3 looks like I will have to give this a spin on my blog…thanks!

    08.11.2011

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  • Christopher B

    This is awesome. When the people at @happycog did it for the first time a while back I was hoping someone would turn it into a plugin.

    08.11.2011

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  • Charles M

    Loving it! Nice combination of features… testing it now…

    08.11.2011

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  • Mangum Michael

    How well does this display on the blog home page, rather than opening an individual post in its own webpage?

    08.11.2011

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  • Tim Hall

    Very nice plugin. Got it on my blog now. Will be great when Facebook Pages and Google+ are supported. In fact, that will make it perfect. :)

    Cheers

    Tim…

    08.12.2011

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  • scottm

    Great first pass at a combined commenting & social plugin. I notice though that my broadcast message use the standard WP.org “short link”, i.e., example.com?p=xxx. Is there a way to (a) post the full URL and allow Twitter’s t.co shortener to do its thing, and/or (b) post using my bit.ly account (and hence use my Bitly Pro custom domain name)?

    08.12.2011

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  • Carlos Rico

    Enhorabuena por el pluggin tan social, lo he probado y me ha gustado.

    08.12.2011

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  • PerfHappyMum

    I am really liking this, and it was bang on the money as I posted something related to commenting systems and which one to choose just a couple of hours before I received your blog update in my inbox! Spooky isn’t it?! http://goo.gl/fb/Pt22x I intend to update it with my thoughts on Social in a few hours :)
    Anyway, I have a question. It doesn’t seem to be pulling the comments from Facebook… what am I doing wrong?

    08.12.2011

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  • Robert Accettura

    Love it.

    If there was a way for me to use a url shortener of my choice (preferably an API that’s plugable like Twitter Tools), I’d likely start using this. I’ve got my own url shortener, and would prefer to use that.

    08.12.2011

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  • mandi

    Wow, this is great — I’ve seen other solutions similar to this, but never implemented this seamlessly. Beautiful.

    08.12.2011

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  • Basti

    Looks nice, still have to questions:

    1. Any tipps on how to translate the plugin (I’m targeting a German audience).

    2. COuld you provide any links regarding 5.) over here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social/installation/ (as a WP newbie I’m confused and wasn’t even able to google that stuff). What should I do?

    08.12.2011

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  • Lara McCulloch

    Thank you for the plugin. I’ve experienced a few issues after installing it:
    1. The comment box does not show up
    2. I am missing the ‘reply’ from the bottom of each comment post (is this because the comments were posted before I installed Social?)
    3. Is there a way of easily reducing the width of the plugin to work with my template? Pingbacks appears under Replies.

    08.12.2011

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    • Maarten

      Hi Lara, did you get a response/fix for your first issue with the missing comments box? I am having the same issue with Social 2.8

      03.16.2013

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      • John

        Hi Maarten, It sounds like that might be something template related. (or possibly a conflict with another plugin) One way to test this would be to temporarily switch your template to the default WP Template and see if you’re still having the same problem. Additionally, the guys that wrote this plugin support it over here: http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/social and might have some thoughts on what might be causing this.

        03.18.2013

  • Culturedeluxe

    You can always rely on MailChimp!

    My request for a future update: adding {category} to the Broadcast Teaser Format. ie, {category} // {title} {url}

    And, of course, Facebook pages ;)

    x

    08.12.2011

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  • fgaeg

    wow, this great! I’ll integrate this plugin soon on my blog, thanks.

    08.12.2011

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  • felipevaz

    Wow, that’s a GREAT plugin! But is it copyrighted or is it open? I couldn’t find any license in the readme or anywhere else…

    08.12.2011

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  • alexkingorg

    Great to see such a positive reaction, and kudos and thanks to MailChimp for both making this plugin possible and creating and hosting the back-end services needed.

    I’ll try to help answer a few questions here.

    > I Like the plugin and got the same doubt about server load and performance. Is that a problem to worry if I use this plugin?

    Social does add to your server load because it is asking it to do more stuff. It is going out to Facebook and Twitter on a schedule and asking for things that it can bring in as comments. However, this is done in a way that it does not directly slow down any real user requests as they are done in separate requests using the built-in WP-CRON system (the same system that activates scheduled posts, etc.).

    Social also pulls data for each post on a sliding scale – starting with refreshes every 15 minutes and scaling back until no social mentions are found. At that point, updates only happen if you click to import manually.

    > Does Social find your post on Twitter if URL shorteners are used?

    Yes. The Twitter search API does this translation for us, so if we search for the actual URL then Twitter will also give us any tweets that have shortened versions of this URL.

    > Is there a way to (a) post the full URL and allow Twitter’s t.co shortener to do its thing, and/or (b) post using my bit.ly account (and hence use my Bitly Pro custom domain name)?

    Twitter will shorten stuff using t.co on its own, if it feels it should.

    > If there was a way for me to use a url shortener of my choice (preferably an API that’s plugable like Twitter Tools), I’d likely start using this. I’ve got my own url shortener, and would prefer to use that.

    Yes, there is a hook on the URL just like Twitter Tools so another plugin could be written to do this. We haven’t discussed making this a default part of Social, but it should be pretty easy for us or someone else to adapt.

    > Wow, that’s a GREAT plugin! But is it copyrighted or is it open? I couldn’t find any license in the readme or anywhere else…

    Social is a GPLv2 plugin, just like everything else you find on WordPress.org.

    08.12.2011

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  • calvin

    Thank you for doing this. Besides facebook and twitter I use Disqus more often. It would be more useful to me if Google+ is included, as some of the comment suggested. Thanks again for all the hard work.

    08.13.2011

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  • tkenny

    I’ve been waiting for a plugin that does something almost exactly like this. Very nice!

    I do have one request. I wish I could only use Twitter for comments so if you want to leave a comment you have to sign in via Twitter. As I run a web design blog, that would be a fantastic solution for me. Is this something you have planned?

    08.13.2011

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  • ruffinprevost

    Very cool plugin — thanks to MailChimp for giving this away to the WordPress community. Lots to love in this, so I feel like a jerk for asking for more, but my wish list: 1) FaceBook page integration 2) MailChimp list subscribe integration 3) “Like,” “Tweet This” and “Follow” buttons 4) A way to turn off or tab-hide retweets. But a wonderful plugin that should become standard gear from every WP blog.

    08.13.2011

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  • Bill Risser

    I like the plugin so far. One (more) request… I find very few apps for Facebook that allow me to select lists for the status update. Is this on the drawing board or even possible?

    08.13.2011

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  • Chris

    Any chance we could get Google+ in this as well?

    08.14.2011

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    • Ben

      Yep, whenever they publish an API we’ll look into it.

      08.15.2011

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      • Peter

        I thought Google released an API, or are you still waiting. It would be great to be able to post to Google +

        11.30.2011

  • josemv

    Gave it a test drive in a localhost environment running latest WP and BP.
    The thing is that for every comment made with twitter or facebook, it creates a user in WP/Buddypress named “facebook_username” or “twitter_username”
    Needless to say that this behaviour is far from being desirable, as the sole purpose of installing this plugin was to give my visitors a better method of leaving comments without becoming members of my site.
    Hope you can isolate this behaviour and repair it

    08.15.2011

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  • Rohan Mehta

    Too good. It’s like two plugins have come together. For twitter, we presently use WP-to-twitter. Thanks MailChimp and CF…

    08.16.2011

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  • Jenni

    So, your comment system can work with CommentLuv?

    08.16.2011

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  • swiseguy

    Anyone else having issues with the facebook comments? For example, it only pulls comments from posts I broadcast-ed. If someone else posts the URL of a blog post, and then it get commented on, that doesn’t show up. Or is that not a feature :)

    08.17.2011

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  • AdamLBaird

    It would be really really nice if I had the option to disable the plugin’s css file and add my own styles.

    08.17.2011

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  • G33KGIRLZ

    Hello! Somebody told me this plugin allows you to automatically send blog posts to subscribers via e-mail, but I can’t find anything about that here. Is there a different plugin that will do that?

    08.18.2011

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      • G33KGIRLZ

        Ok. I’ll check out the RSS-to-email. So there is no MailChimp/WordPress plugin that will do this? It is a type of campaign set up within MailChimp? My client is convinced it’s a “WordPress App.”

        08.18.2011

  • Spencer Robertson

    I was going to install this, but when I sign in with Facebook on your site it shows another person’s name (not my own)! How is this possible? I am clearly only signed into my own profile.

    08.18.2011

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  • spenrobertson

    This is working under my Twitter account, but continuously selects random names and people when I attempt to login with Facebook.

    08.18.2011

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  • Chris

    I have noticed when I activate this plugin, it knocks out my ability to update theme settings in the backend of WP. I use a framework which uses AJAX, I think, to update, etc. Is there a way for me to fix this? Or has anyone else experienced this issue? I really would like to use this plugin, but I don’t want it breaking things.

    08.20.2011

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  • Stefan

    Love the plugin but there is some unexpected behaviour or a bug. When you schedule a post for publishing in the future and choose to promote it, the tweets / Facebook posts happen immediately (when you click schedule) and not upon the scheduled publish date.

    08.20.2011

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    • Aarron

      We’re looking at this and hope to have it resolved in the next version.

      08.23.2011

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  • vbkuser

    A support request …(Please delete my previous comments,there were typos)
    If a user commented using “Twitter” , a separate account is being created besides his local account in my WordPress installation. can I let his twitter account added to his current account?
    Thank you!

    08.21.2011

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    • alexkingorg

      Yes, your users can connect their accounts on their Profile tab.

      08.23.2011

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    • josemv

      @vbkuser I reported the same behaviour a couple of comments above yours, but my case was involving buddypress

      08.23.2011

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  • Jess

    I love the concept behind Social – however I’ve run into an issue. I schedule all my posts – and if I say ‘yes’ to Social posting it sends out the tweet and facebook note when I schedule the post, rather than when it’s published! This basically means I can’t use it. Is there away around this or am I missing something? Thanks!

    08.21.2011

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    • Aarron

      Thanks for letting us know. We’ll see what we can do to resolve the scheduling issue in a future release.

      08.22.2011

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  • free_thinker

    Is it possible to call the broadcast function from outside the plugin? I post to my blog using the postie plugin (post by email alternative).. And the broadcasts are not being sent out when posting using the postie plugin. Is there a function I can call from within the postie plugin to send out the broadcasts. postie uses wp_insert_post.

    08.22.2011

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    • Aarron

      Right now, the only way to call the broadcast function is through the plugin interface itself.

      08.22.2011

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      • free_thinker

        @Aarron, thanks for your response, the plugin has config options of automatically posting when posted using xmlrpc/mail. How does that work? I could possibly add an action inside social to post when post is inserted using wp_insert_post?

        08.22.2011

      • free_thinker

        wp_insert_post, should trigger publish_post, which is what broadcast function is attached too, so what do I need to change in the broadcast function so that it gets broadcasted?

        08.22.2011

  • vkasshu

    Hi !
    I am getting an error message when trying to follow some one using “follow ” option here

    Error : ” Sorry, something went wrong.

    Small_robot The provided callback url http://blog.mailchimp.com/introducing-social-a-wordpress-plugin/ is not authorized for the client registered to ”. ”

    Same error message on my site too , when using the ‘Social’ plugin. Is this some sort of problem with plugin or is it on my end?

    Thank you !

    08.22.2011

    reply

    • alexkingorg

      Sorry to hear of the trouble. We’re not seeing this at this time so I’m not sure what the issue may be. If you’d like to provide more information on this so we can try to reproduce the problem, please create a thread in the WordPress support forums so we can discuss in more detail there,

      http://wordpress.org/support/

      08.23.2011

      reply

  • Tamarah

    Just wondering…once someone is signed in, does this comment box not show up for them? I have installed on my site and this (or comment box) is not showing as an option.

    08.23.2011

    reply

  • Tamarah

    will commentors be automatically notified via email of any ‘replys’ to their post? Why doesn’t the NOTIFY button show up below the post section on my site?

    08.23.2011

    reply

  • Aaron

    I would really love for this to be optimized more for customization… integration with different color schemes, themes, etc. I would be willing to go for a paid version with greater ease of customization. Keep up the great work!

    08.23.2011

    reply

    • Aarron

      If you take a look at the readme file bundled with the plugin, you’ll find instructions about how you can totally customize the design of the comments interface.

      08.24.2011

      reply

  • clarklab

    This is looking pretty nice. Really just posting to test the Twitter auth before I slap it onto my own blog. Huzzah!

    08.25.2011

    reply

  • samsabri

    Great idea! I can’t wait to try it out on my site :)

    08.25.2011

    reply

  • cbjohnson82

    Sucks. I just spent a bunch of time signing up and installing a competitors product. Yours looks much cleaner….. Looks like I’ll be spending all day tomorrow redoing my wordpress on a sub domain to see if I like it better :)

    08.27.2011

    reply

  • simonszu

    I’d like to have the “Broadcast this Post” option when writing a post set to true by default. Does anyone know how to do this?

    08.28.2011

    reply

  • Thomas

    I wonder why it says “Last Updated: 2010-5-23″?

    08.28.2011

    reply

  • Jorge

    Hi,

    How can the test published in the frotal of the webpage be translated in another language?

    Thank you

    08.29.2011

    reply

    • Jorge

      sorry :-) “Text” NOT “Test”

      08.29.2011

      reply

  • Social, ein weiteres WordPress Plugin für Kommentare › Notizn

    [...] Social schafft eine Schnittstelle zu Facebook und Twitter. Die Blog-Beiträge können an beide Dienste gesendet werden und Kommentierende haben die Möglichkeit sich mit ihrem Twitter- oder Facebook-Account anzumelden (welches aber nicht zwingend ist). Das können andere Plugins natürlich auch. [...]

    08.29.2011

    reply

  • trmash

    Sorry if it’s been covered (lots of comments here), but can ‘excerpt’ be used instead of ‘content’? My posts often have an image at the top, which Social grabs as the first part of the content rather than the first sentence. Thanks!

    08.30.2011

    reply

    • Aarron

      Not currently, but that’s a nice idea. We’ll consider that for a future release.

      08.31.2011

      reply

  • simonszu

    It seems, Social can’t broadcast to Facebook for me. Every time i get a notification that i should re-auth my account. Could that be because of a captcha, facebook tries to show?

    08.31.2011

    reply

  • haki

    Froze my site. I also uninstalled.

    08.31.2011

    reply

  • PorpoiseNews

    Awesome plugin. Is there a way to post not to my personal facebook account, but to a facebook page (where I’m an admin)?

    09.04.2011

    reply

  • wkeving

    Just as a warning, this plugin will break most WooThemes installs. By break, I mean that Social makes it so that updates to the WooTheme theme options panel will not be saved. It’s been noted in the forums several times, but no official responses. I’d hold off using if you’re a WooThemes user.

    09.05.2011

    reply

  • irishmark23

    As many have mentioned – Need the ability to change the CSS!!!!
    The coded CSS in the plugin looks ugly as sin in my theme.

    09.11.2011

    reply

    • Aarron

      You can already customize the CSS to your match your site. See the readme file that comes with the plugin for guidance on how to create a separate style sheet to override defaults.

      09.12.2011

      reply

  • Jim Van Wyck

    This is an interesting way to keep a conversation active between twitter, facebook, and a website. Going to install it this week on a couple of smaller sites before it goes up on Meditation Techniques

    09.19.2011

    reply

  • morgan

    i’m having some issues using Social with Buddypress 1.5 – has it been tested with the latest Buddypress

    a couple of issues:
    - with Social installed I see 2 avatars next to user comments
    - can’t connect with Facebook (i get a page of errors), twitter works fine

    thanks

    09.21.2011

    reply

  • SamRSparrow

    I’ve installed this and I love it, but it isn’t pulling in twitter or Facebook comments. When I manually put in the twitter URL for a tweet, it comes up as blank. Do the twitter urls have to be a certain format?

    10.04.2011

    reply

  • Jean-Claude Frick

    Great PlugIn. I love the elegant style of it. Unfortunately i am not able to get the Cron Jobs to work for importing the tweets back into my Blog.
    Neither the included nor manual Cron Jobs will work.
    It just didn’t happen anything. If i import the Tweets/FB Post manually from the WP Backend it works perfectly well.
    Where can i get support for my Problem?

    Thank you very much (also for the great work with this PlugIn)

    JC

    10.11.2011

    reply

  • tronicscribe

    This is what I’ve been looking for! Disqus and Livefyre would be great, but I didn’t want a third-party system, and I didn’t want reduced load times and pop-in.

    Social so far seems perfect. I do notice a couple minor snags though, one, when I sign in via Twitter I get an additional alert saying my data will be sent over an unencrypted network, which I then need to click okay to allow. That’s one extra step I don’t want, but I’m not sure if that’s due to the Social plugin, or my browser settings.

    Two, I see that the checkbox to share my comment (at least I’m guessing that’s what it’s for) is mostly hidden. Perhaps due to CSS compatibility, so if this can easily be fixed by overwriting it with my own CSS, then that’s not a big deal. Overall Social looks great!

    10.17.2011

    reply

    • Linda

      I’m having this problem too “Social so far seems perfect. I do notice a couple minor snags though, one, when I sign in via Twitter I get an additional alert saying my data will be sent over an unencrypted network, which I then need to click okay to allow. That’s one extra step I don’t want, but I’m not sure if that’s due to the Social plugin, or my browser settings.”

      10.19.2011

      reply

  • Mr P

    Soo promising, and all working nicely.

    Except it doesn’t work with Facebook with wordpress 3.2.1. Easy to reproduce problem, as the Sign in with Facebook button doesn’t work on THIS page.
    ———-
    Server error
    The website encountered an error while retrieving http://blog.mailchimp.com/?authorized=true&p=. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly.
    Here are some suggestions:
    Reload this webpage later.
    HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.
    ————
    Will it be fixed soon?

    10.19.2011

    reply

  • nick

    This is a handy plugin but sadly there are some issues with it. Known issues that are yet to be address.

    I attempted to use the plugin but finds that it shows incorrect comments or same comments across all posts. also had an error when connecting to facebook. Why connect to a facebook user account rather than connecting to the page for the particular site.

    I would rather use a plugin like this than a facebook only plugin. but can’t use it with these these issue. Hope the author will act on the opportunity to make this plugin popular. Before someone else do a better job.

    Nevertheless, your on the right path.

    Cheers

    10.30.2011

    reply

  • Matt

    This plugin is such a great idea. Sadly thought I can’t get it to play nicely with the theme I am using. I am using the Green Stimulus theme (http://wordpress.salesforce.com/) and for some reason it makes the twitter text box on my homepage go wrong. Plus the comment box is really tiny. Any ideas why those two things are happening? Any solutions I can try? I really want to integrate this plugin with my site but can’t at the moment, any help will be much appreciated.

    11.01.2011

    reply

    • Aarron

      Hey, Matt. A new version of Social is on its way soon, but in the mean time you may want to jump on over to http://wordpress.org/support/ to discuss the issues you’re seeing. We can’t test the plugin on every WordPress theme out there so we’re not aware of any problems with the theme you are using. The design of Social can be totally customized with a little CSS. Check out the readme file that comes with the plugin for guidance on that.

      11.04.2011

      reply

  • Victor Jalbă-Șoimaru

    Notify me of followup comments via e-mail does not seem to work. At least not for me. And why the looooooooooooooong comment list? WP comments default template allows pagination and multiple sort (newest/oldest). Very usefull if you could merge this directly into the plugin. (i mean comments follow up via email and pagination of some sort).

    11.16.2011

    reply

  • segoviasmith

    Sweet. I’m gonna play around with this little comment tool and see how it stacks up to LiveFyre which I just hooked up the other day.

    11.24.2011

    reply

  • Orlando

    I can’t see the plugin in comments in wordpress 3.3.1 with Canvas theme.
    Any suggestions?
    Thanks.

    01.16.2012

    reply

    • Aarron

      Hey, Orlando.

      Unfortunately we can’t trouble shoot every WordPress theme out there, but you can post a question here to get some help from the community: http://wordpress.org/support/

      01.18.2012

      reply

  • Stacie Durnford

    Love the plugin. Works beautifully. One problem I am having….when I share to my Facebook page via the MailChimp social plugin, the “share” button on my Facebook page disappears. It only happens when its a post via MailChimp. Any thoughts?

    02.05.2012

    reply

  • CreatorCoach

    Great app! Can I aask how to send a picture icon to Facebook though? When I use Shareaholic it will offer a choice of images to post onto Facebook – as defined in Worpdress. But the post I get from Social is plain. Eventually I will have to stop using it as the pictures are a wellliked aspect of my blog posts.

    02.29.2012

    reply

    • German

      Hi! Have you resolved this??? Or are you using another thing? Thanks!

      06.20.2012

      reply

  • DJPeepThis

    This is pretty awesome. Wonder if reddit, google+, pinterest & stumbleupon will be added.

    02.29.2012

    reply

  • Christian Don

    It’s great and like a simple version of Disqus.com plug in. BUT, does this plugin work for multi author blogs, so that the appropriate author would get notified if a comment is posted on the blog post they wrote. I think this part is key and under-estimated by plugin developers, especially if you understand that TIMELY two way conversation is what makes a responsive community… Please let me know if that is supported by this plugin. Thanks!

    03.02.2012

    reply

    • Aarron

      Hey, Christian. This is a standard WordPress feature. Social doesn’t affect it in any way.

      03.02.2012

      reply

  • Al

    I’m using this plugin on my site exclusively for the Post-to-twitter and Post-to-facebook functionality.

    Just today I noticed that it had removed the link to my Facebook page. When I tried to re-add it, it could find my Facebook account but it couldn’t find any pages associated with it.

    Nothing else has changed on my site, however Facebook have announced that Facebook pages are changing (to something that appears to look more like their Timeline view).

    Has anyone else experienced this issue? Does anyone know if it’s to do with changes at Facebook’s end?

    03.08.2012

    reply

  • मानस प्रकाश

    It doesn’t look like social
    (1)honors html tags in the comments.
    (2)successfully queries twitter/facebook for tweets, RTs, posts, likes, etc. for wordpress posts that were published way before the plugin was installed or activated.

    03.15.2012

    reply

  • Mo Raja

    With this there’s no captcha plus users dont need to sign in to post comment? I think it’s vulnerable to spam.

    04.13.2012

    reply

    • Ben

      Actually, it doesn’t just allow everything through. It still passes through akismet and we’re still able to moderate comments in WP as always.

      04.13.2012

      reply

  • Martin Zoot

    Why does it create new user accounts in WordPress? Is there any chance to work without this “feature”?

    05.01.2012

    reply

    • Canton

      I’m curious about this too — why new accounts must be created in WordPress, and if this is more of a work-around, or if it’s something generally beneficial.

      05.14.2012

      reply

      • Aarron

        Hey, Canton. We create WP accounts for commenters for a few reasons:

        1. You stay “logged in” across page loads without an API hit on each page load
        2. The accounts can be connected to existing users
        3. It’s a tried and true model (based on LDAP)

        05.15.2012

  • test

    Seems like an elegant solution to the dilemma of “which 3rd party auth do we get in bed with.” Does the plugin chronologically interlace comments left from different social networks into the single “5 Replies” tab in your screenshot?

    05.13.2012

    reply

    • Aarron

      Yup, that is exactly what we build this plugin for. All of the social conversations around your blog posts magically coalesce in your comments.

      05.14.2012

      reply

  • abdur

    Fails! why?
    It doesnt have thumbs up and down and report function
    It will not work with theme’s style sheet.

    05.13.2012

    reply

  • Gaurav Kumar

    Excellent Plugin.
    Just downloaded and implemented.
    Its a live example of how a small idea and insight of human behaviors once taken into account can create revolutionary innovations.

    05.23.2012

    reply

  • Kevin Mahoney

    Quick question… when the user goes to sign in with twitter or facebook, it sends them to the social network’s page asking the user for authorization for “Social Proxy by Mailchimp” to access their account information. Is there any way to change this to the name of our website? I’m just worried that users will be taken aback when they see a name completely unrelated to a site they’re visiting.

    05.27.2012

    reply

  • dandestiny

    Having problems with connecting my accounts for mailchimp social, I get the message: “You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/index.php on this server” – anyone have any ideas on what’s wrong?

    05.30.2012

    reply

  • Bernhard von AN24

    Nice plugin. It causes very much server load. YSlow gives this site an overall performance score 83.

    05.31.2012

    reply

  • Tiv Whitaker

    Hi Guys,

    I am confused with social plugin. The post that ends up on my facebook page has what seems as random featured photos, where is the feature photo defined before broadcasting the post to social networks, especially the facebook page post. I can’t work it out

    06.06.2012

    reply

  • That's It! Creative Services

    Been looking for something like this for a while. Glad I finally found it. Thanks to the mailchimp team and Alex King for developing this.

    06.15.2012

    reply

  • German

    Hi, this plugin is awesome. My only critic is that facebook posts don’t get an image. Images in facebook are larger every time it updates, they are very important. It is a pitty not to have an image pushed to the facebook post with Social.

    06.20.2012

    reply

  • Lesley ChiefChick Batson

    This seems like a great plugin but the BIG miss is that it doesn’t have the opt in for to our mailchimp mailing lists. Seems like you could allow us to determine which list to assign to the post or page and then it would just be another checkbox like you have ‘also post to fb’. They wouldn’t need to see it if they are already a subscriber. Any chance this can get incorporated or is there already a plugin that can do this? Thanks!

    07.15.2012

    reply

  • bilyana

    Hello,
    thanks a lot for a great plugin. I just had a little problem with it. I have a business account with FB and i try to post to the pageassociated with the account, but it never appears. Is there something additional i need to do in order to configure it correctly. Any help will be greatly appreciated. thanks

    07.17.2012

    reply

    • Aarron

      Sure, you can configure where comments post in Facebook inside Settings > Social in your WordPress install.

      07.17.2012

      reply

      • bilyana

        Hi Aron, thanks for your quick reply. I have all this configured, i have my FB account connected. Even when i broadcast manually in the admin of the post it shows ‘Sent to’ showing my FB account. but the post never appears on the wall of my FB. i checked FB appications, it is there. I tried with my personal account no problem, but with the business account it doesn’t work. any clue? thanks for your help

        07.17.2012

      • Aarron

        Hard to tell what’s up without seeing it, but you might try disconnecting then reconnecting to your business FB account. We don’t offer support on Social, as it’s a free little experimental project, but if reconnecting doesn’t work you can post your question here to get community support: http://wordpress.org/support/

        07.19.2012

  • Samuel Fructuoso

    Good job folks. I just have one question: Is there any way to translate this plugin?

    07.26.2012

    reply

    • Aarron

      Social ties in to the WordPress translation engine.

      07.27.2012

      reply

  • Johnny

    Does your system copy comments on my websites server or just save them on yours?

    07.28.2012

    reply

  • Ugh

    [...] character limit. We’ll have to see how often that even matters. MailChimp’s Social Broadcasting plug-in for WordPress does a better job of this; it allows for wholly separate and unique posts to [...]

    08.02.2012

    reply

  • ap

    Hy!
    I activated the social plugin, but i have a problem.
    Everything works fine, but one thing is missing. The plugin don’t show the ‘Sing in with Twitter’ and the ‘Sing in with Facebook’ buttons. Only shows the ‘You must be logged in to post a comment.’ text. See here: premiumlivesets.hu.
    What’s wrong?
    The plugin options page drop this message: “When you enable Social, users will be created when they log in with Facebook or Twitter to comment. These users are created without a role and will be prevented from accessing the admin side of WordPress until an administrator edits the user to give them a role.”
    How can I enable?
    Here is my optioons page: http://kepfeltoltes.hu/120803/social_www.kepfeltoltes.hu_.png

    08.03.2012

    reply

  • TAyyeb

    Hi, This Plugin is superb, but I am facing some issue with it. When I am setting a time and scheduling my post for auto publish with broadcating = yes, then in this case it wont broadcast my post some times. Post get published on scheduled time , but broadcast dont work for most of the time & some time it works.

    08.15.2012

    reply

  • Noah's Dad

    Is there a way to style the plug in to look more like the native wordpress comment system? I’l like to leave off the “replies, tweets, facebook, etc” tabs and have it just show the replies (like the native wordpress comments.) Thanks.

    08.21.2012

    reply

      • Noah's Dad

        Thanks, I just selected the option in the plug in to not use socia’s styling, but my themes. It didn’t change the way the comments look, but I’m also not sure if the plug in is working at all. I’ve left another comment above explaining what is going on.

        08.22.2012

  • john m

    Any chance of tumblr integration in the future?

    08.25.2012

    reply

  • Richard Chotty

    Nice plugin, but I have a small issue. when I sign in with FB, type in the the comment and then post it, the site reloads but no comment is posted. The text label “Comment” appeared at the the left side of the text area and after a second try, the comment is posted.

    08.30.2012

    reply

    • John

      Hi Richard, I did some checking and spoke with the developer. They haven’t seen or replicated this behavior, but believe it might be caused by a conflict with another plugin or template. The most common method to rule out a conflict is to disable all plugins except the one in question, test and if it works start re-enabling each plugin and testing after each plugin is enabled until you find the source of the conflict. If it is template related, you can temporarily switch to one of the default templates to see if that solves the problem as well.

      09.18.2012

      reply

  • Noah's Dad

    Is anyone checking the support forum on this plug in? I’ve left a question on there, but no one was responded (or to the many other questions that have been left on there.) I’d like to get this plug in working. Thanks.

    09.09.2012

    reply

  • Aditya Kumar

    Not able to get this plugin to work. After activating it , I tried adding my FB a/c to it but does not ever add them.

    10.09.2012

    reply

    • John

      Hi Aditya, If you look in the FAQ for the plugin: http://eepurl.com/qnPoP you’ll see there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to Facebook. The developers have noticed latency when adding some items from Facebook and due to a bug in the Facebook search API (explained in the above link), items posted in a certain way may not be included. One other thing to remember is that the updates happen 2,4,8,12, and every 24 hours after the initial broadcast. If there’s been no activity on Facebook or Twitter during the first 48 hours the updates will be discontinued for that post.

      10.09.2012

      reply

  • AlexK

    I do wish for two things:

    1. That you could use your existing Facebook App ID instead of the Social Proxy by Mailchimp App so that you could use the same log-in authentication to an App you may already use for other features like Like Box, Like, Login, etc.

    AND/OR

    2. the “Sign in with Facebook” capability checked against existing email addresses as one of my sites uses the WP-FB AutoConnect Pro Plugin with which I had already authenticated. When I authenticated with this, I inherited new permissions and a new account was created tied to the my same Facebook Profile. So in order to use it, I must choose between one or the other login and/or disable commenting completely.

    Thanks for the great free plugin though!

    11.12.2012

    reply

  • Rod

    Checking out how this plugin works. Looks pretty sweet.

    11.21.2012

    reply

  • Deepak Kumar Majhi

    I am using Social Plugin for a while now. I Want to modify the comment form a bit. I want to add few more fields. Could you please tell me exactly which codes and files to modify.

    11.23.2012

    reply

    • John

      Hi Deepak, The guys at Crowdfavorite who actually coded this plugin can be found over here: http://eepurl.com/sfwbP They’d probably be able to point you in the right direction.

      11.27.2012

      reply

  • frdelossantos

    I’m using this on my site but the bottom part where the button “Post it” is gets cut out, I only see half the button. How can I fix this?

    12.09.2012

    reply

    • John

      Hi Franklin, I don’t see your site, but my first thought based on your description is probably a piece of code in your template or possibly another plugin that is overriding things somewhere. One way to help troubleshoot it, might be to try a different template and/or shut off all of your plugins and turn social on. Just turn on each plugin 1 at a time until the symptom returns and that should give you a good idea where the problem might be.

      12.20.2012

      reply

    • John

      I talked to the developers over at CrowdFavorite (the people who wrote Social) and they don’t believe it will pull in the old comments for you. It’s hard to know for sure without testing some built out data, but based on what they know, they don’t think it’ll work that way.

      01.14.2013

      reply

  • geekazine

    Have a problem with Social. The Featured Image shows up and covers over the “Publish” button. I don’t know if the image shows up because of another plugin. If the publish button was to the left instead of right, it would fix the problem. I have a screenshot if you need to see.

    01.17.2013

    reply

    • John

      Hmmm, that sounds like it’s probably some kind of CSS conflict/override scenario going on. If your comfortable in code you should be able to spot the conflict with FireBug or something like that. Otherwise, you could try disabling all your plugins and then re-enabling one at a time until the problem shows up again and then work from there to sort it out.

      01.17.2013

      reply

  • Mak

    Sounds great. I am gonna try this on my blog. I am getting less time for social media marketing :)

    01.27.2013

    reply

  • Bilabong

    The plugin seems amazing!
    I understand it can pull facebook comments back to the blog comment thread, but when an answer is given on the blog, will this comment also be published in the facebook comment thread?
    In other words, will both the blog and facebook comments remain identical?
    Thanks!

    04.21.2013

    reply

    • John

      Hi Camille, The social plugin is a WordPress plugin designed to aggregate those comments to your blog, so currently it’s a “one direction” kind of thing. That being said, I believe pushing the comments into FaceBook would also require the creation of an additional FaceBook app separate from this plugin, before it would even be a possibility.

      04.22.2013

      reply

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