Social, the WordPress plugin we created with the fine folks at CrowdFavorite, has just gotten an update that introduces some new features, improved performance, and a few bug fixes. You might recall that it’s a great way to connect the conversations that are happening on Facebook and Twitter about your WordPress content. Social aggregates comments onto your blog, and helps you broadcast to social channels when you publish.
We knocked out a lot of the things on our to-do list. Here’s a brief synopsis of what’s new:
- Fancier broadcasts to Facebook
- When replying to Facebook comments, try to post back to the Facebook thread too
- Use Social just for broadcasting if you like
- Show what channels you’ve already broadcast to
- Reply to a tweet with a broadcast
- @replies to comments about your post are imported
- Respond to Twitter comments from your blog comments interface
- Send customized broadcasts to each account (Twitter, Facebook) in a single action – each account has its own form that you can edit.
- Option to supress retweets and likes in your comments
- Support for the Lazy Load plugin
The coolest part of this update is that Social now functions as a platform for other social WordPress plugins. You can choose to disable any features that you don’t want on your site and just use the connections to social networks. Expect a new release of Twitter Tools, built on Social, very soon.
About Google+
We’ve heard a lot of requests for a Google+ integration, but unfortunatly there’s still no official API available. We have a hunch that it’s not far off. When it is released, it’ll be top on our to-do list.
Fork It
If you like Social, but wish it had new features, or worked with some specific themes, please fork our GitHub repo and hack to your heart’s content. This project is open source and just waiting for your contributions.
Download
To learn more about how to install and customize Social, take a look at our detailed read me file.
UPDATE
Alex King, the coding mastermind behind Social and Crowd Favorite, has a super detailed post about the Social 2.5 update on his blog.
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I kind of like this a lot but the only thing that’s really off right now is Google+. I wonder why Google is making it hard for developers to really integrate their services with other software now that everything in the web is social and more and more people use different tools to work on a single project. We just can’t monopolize everything so having your product work with another tool is crucial to making your product survive in this age where ppl are now involved more than ever in social media. Google should start giving out API soon for Plus.
- Jules Mariano of Total Bounty
I’m curious to know if changes to the css file will be overwritten on each upgrade?
Hey, Karljl.
If you’re following the recommended steps in the readme when customizing your design (adding a separate CSS file for your customizations instead of altering the CSS that comes with the plugin), then your CSS will remain untouched when you upgrade.
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@MailChimp olaaaa kien eres?
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Social Plugin for WordPress Updated http://t.co/9Usyesz1
Can’t wait for 2013 #museumnext! Also massive thanks for all the sponsors (@mailchimp especially)
In order to take advantage of the Social plugin, I’d love to see an easier way to add Open Graph information, such as an OG description, to MailChimp messages. Being able to choose the image is a nice start, but having to open, export, code, and import each email to add other OG details is a little time-consuming. Thanks!
Hi Kevin, is there a way to have images posted on facebook with this plugin? Thanks! German
Hi,
Since I installed your plug-in on my WordPress blog last week, I’ve been getting 403 errors listed by Google Webmasters. This is what I’m seeing:
“http://www.mydomain.com/?social_controller=auth&social_action=authorize&target=https%3A%2F%2Fsopresto.mailchimp.com%2Ftwitter%2Fauthorize&post_id=778″
I’m not technically minded so don’t know if this is supposed to happen, or if it’s an issue.
Can you shed any light?
Thanks
Hi, Patricia. That’s not something we’ve seen before. You can post a question about this on the support forum to get some help. http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/social
Hey guys, is this plugin supposed to send email when comments are posted? I have never received any and I’ve tried a few tests to see if I can determine what the deal is. Any idea?
Hi Angel, That’s not built into the Social Plugin, but the guys over at Crowdfavorite (they wrote Social) recommend the following plugin: http://eepurl.com/p6WW9 to get notifications via email.
Fab plugin! 2 questions….
Social posts my blog updates to twitter with the ?p=6460 type link instead of a friendly url. Is there a way to change this? (my urls on the site are very friendly!)
Secondly. Social updates my business facebook page perfectly but it does not return any comments back into the post thread from facebook. When re-editing the post the social tab claims only to have twitter?
Any ideas?
Hi Mark, The WordPress permalinks (the /?p=1234 links) or the internally generated short links are currently the only two link types the plugin uses. It’s worth noting that these links are how the plugin uses the Facebook search API to aggregate your content. The social plugin attempts to aggregate comments every 2,4,8,12 and 24 hours after the initial broadcast of the post and will continue at 24 hour intervals after the 48 hour mark. If no comments have been made via Twitter and/or Facebook in the first 48 hours after broadcast, aggregation for that post will stop. You can find a lot more detail and some other special circumstances at the FAQ section found here: http://eepurl.com/qnPoP over on the WordPress site.
Thanks for the reply John. I’ve got social working great on my wife’s website now. I think I only have 1 issue…..when connecting to a facebook fan page (business page) the avatar shows as just a blue question mark. If a comment is made on facebook as ‘the page’ then it’s passed to social and the blog no problem but the avatar is still the blue question mark rather than the profile thumbnail as per a regular user. Any ideas?
Hi Mark, I was trying to sort out what might be causing this for you. As of yet, I’ve not been able to track it down and even after talking with the developers I can only come to the conclusion that it might be a case of Facebook behaving badly. The only other thought that comes to mind is to make sure that your cache has been cleared or even try a different browser just to make sure you aren’t pulling a stored avatar from a single failed pull from FaceBook. If I come across anything else I’ll try to update you here.
This plugin is not pulling the featured image as a thumbnail on the broadcast posts to my FB page. It pics a random sidebar image instead. Is there a fix for this?
Hi Jeana, The guys over at CrowdFavorite (the people who created this) say that while the image is sent, sometimes Facebook chooses to do it’s own thing and randomly select a different image. Since Facebook doesn’t always seem to play nice, they’ve suggested installing one of the WP plugins that would set Open Graph Tags to help get the correct image used.
can i remove the guest login, as i’m getting lots of spam
Hi Helen, That should actually be taken care of under the “Discussion” option of general settings for your blog. I believe the option is something along the lines of “Must be registered and logged in to comment” as the Social plugin generally relies on the pre-existing settings for WordPress.
Hi, awesome plugin. I love it! Will you add Facebook group support? I can simultaneously run Wordbooker to post to groups but it would be nice to have group support within Social. Thanks!!!! You rock.