We recently released a cool little WordPress plugin called Social that pulls the conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your blog into each post and makes it easy to broadcast to social channels when you publish. We were scratching our own itch. We’ve pined for a better way to handle comments on our blog, so we teamed up with our friends at Crowd Favorite to make a tailor-made solution. It turns out that we’re not alone. Ten thousand people have tried Social on their blogs too. After months of usage, we discovered a few things we could do better. Today we’re releasing Social 2.0 with a whole bunch of improvements:

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I spent a few days working with the lads at WooThemes getting some MailChimp magic into one of their most popular themes, Canvas.

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I’ve been running into a lot of people who are using their blog as their CMS lately, and who want to combine them with MailChimp. I usually recommend they create content in their blog, then publish it to their email list automatically via our RSS-to-email tool. Believe it or not though, there are people with valid business cases for going in the opposite direction: from MailChimp to blog. All we could do for them in the past was recommend they change their business model (not exactly an ideal pitch to customers).

Thankfully, Mark Parolisi has created a WordPress plugin for MailChimp that “fetches your campaign archives and either creates them as posts in your WP database, or just displays them live by fetching them from MailChimp upon request.”

Give it a shot and let Mark know if you find it useful. Oh, and some other WP plugins for MailChimp you might like:

• WP Analytics 360 – mashes your mailchimp and website traffic into your WordPress dashboard. Shows power bloggermailers how their work is driving traffic to their site. (21,000+ downloads)
• WP signup form – stick a MailChimp signup form on your WP blog. (20,000+ downloads)

We’ve been busy. In addition to all the new MailChimp v4.2 features we just launched, we’ve also been working with the folks at Crowdfavorite to build an awesome new (and totally free!) Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

In a nutshell, it uses the power of Google Analytics to tell bloggers what kind of an effect they’re having on overall website traffic. We’ve made it super easy to tell if your blog posts (and email campaigns) are driving traffic to your website — it’s all embedded right in your WordPress Dashboard!

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Ever wish there was a simple plugin that allowed you to add MailChimp’s list management and delivery power to your CMS, e-commerce cart, or blog? Some crafty MailChimp customers wished the same thing, and have used the powerful MailChimp API to create plugins for Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Zen Cart, and more. And we’ve created a “/plugins” directory to showcase their work:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/plugins/

[update: most of the Ruby on Rails "plugins" were actually API Wrappers and thus are on our API downloads page: http://blog.mailchimp.com/api/downloads/]

The latest is from Scott Wilson, aka ThatSoftwareGuy, who created a discounts plugin for Zen Cart. Pretty nifty!

Developers, if you’ve got a plugin, be sure to tell us about it. If we post your plugin, we’ll send you a Chumby as a thank-you gift.