The social Web is a concept, and you’ve got a ton of profiles to the leftand right. Each social bookmarking tool has its own submit link, and while you can just add them all to your theme (which we’ll get to later in the book), you can also rely on a plugin. It’s all connected these days, after all. So why not add a little bit of the social Web to your site? Show offyour Twitter and let your visitors submit your content to Digg. You can do most of that directly in your theme with some custom code (usually found on the various social networking sites’ tools pages), but if you want to take a shortcut or add some extra social Web flair, then these plugins may help.
Lifestream (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/): The Lifestream plugin easily adds lifestreaming features to your WordPress site. Just install it and set up what online accounts and RSS feeds it should fetch data from, and then you can include it using a shortcode on a Page, for example. You can also customize each element thanks to CSS classes being added, and there is built-in support for several of the largest social media properties out there, although just about anything with an RSS feed will work. And, of course, it is ready for localization as well as being constantly updated, which makes it an interesting option for those of you wanting to lifestream from within WordPress.
Twitter Tools (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/): Twitter Tools connects your WordPress weblog with Twitter, and lets you send tweets from the weblog to your account. A simple enough settings page makes this a breeze to set up, and you can even control how the tweets you’ve sent should be tagged and handled on your own site. This means that you can have an asides category and send everything posted in it to Twitter, or the other way around.
Tweetable (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetable/): Tweetable is a really cool plugin that lets you tweet from your WordPress admin, among other things. It auto-posts to Twitter as well, with optional Google Analytics campaign tags if you’re curious about the stats, and there’s even a widget to display your latest tweets and a TweetMeme (www.tweetmeme.com) feature. A must to try for any Twitter junkie using WordPress.
ShareThis (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/): Sending posts to social bookmarking sites is popular, and adding this functionality to each and every post on a site, well, that’s a reasonable effect of this. ShareThis is more than just a plugin, it is a service that hosts your submit form, which means that you can get stats and everything if you sign up for an account. The only thing to keep in mind here is that any third-party element will rely on that party’s ability to serve the data. In other words, if the ShareThis server is slow or even unavailable, then so is some or all of your sharing functionality.
Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/E-mail Button (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ add-to-any/): This plugin integrates the hosted AddToAny.com sharing button. You may also want to look at the Subscribe button as well, if you like this service: wordpress.org/ extend/plugins/add-to-any-subscribe/.
The classification on this one may seem a bit weird at first, but think about it. Most smartphones have had RSS support for quite some time, and a few high end “regular” mobile phones as well. The natural next step is we will start to consume more and more content through mobile devices.
Align RSS Images (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/align-rss-images/): Images floating to the leftand right on your site may be pretty to look at right there, but for RSS subscribers that same image will be in the midst of everything. You can just skip floating images, but that’s a shame. Better to use Align RSS Images to parse the WordPress default align code (being alignleftand alignright) and swap for HTML equivalents to make things look good. No settings needed, just install and forget about it.
RSS Footer (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer/): RSS Footer adds a line at the beginning or at the end of every item in your RSS feed. This means that you can insert a copyright notice to make things harder on the scrapers, or promote your site or other products to readers that prefer the feed to the original site. Very handy and easily customized.
Disable RSS (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-rss/): This plugin does just one thing and one thing only: it disables the RSS feeds from a WordPress install. This can come in handy in static sites where RSS doesn’t fulfill any purpose whatsoever.
Subscribe2 (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe2/): Subscribe2 is a really powerful plugin. It lets your users subscribe to your updates and hence get notifications via e-mail as per the settings you have. Perhaps you want to send a digest on a per-post basis, daily, or weekly. You can also send an e-mail to registered users, much like a traditional newsletter, if you will. The settings are easy enough to manage, as are the e-mail templates, so you can get started early on. As always, when it comes to sending e-mails, all hosts may not play nicely, so you should pay attention and do some tests to make sure that everything is being sent the way it was supposed to. Also, there is always the risk of being branded as a spammer in the eyes of ISPs, so use with caution.
MobilePress (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilepress/): MobilePress is a cool plugin that serves a mobile theme rather than your regular one when the user is visiting from a mobile device, such as an iPhone for example. You can tell the plugin in which cases to serve the mobile theme and when not to, and there’s even a theme interface similar to the standard one in WordPress so that you can create a mobile theme that fits your brand. An excellent choice for anyone expecting visitors from a mobile phone, which is just about anyone these days, right?
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1. How to do lifestreaming with WordPress
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