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:
- A better interface to display retweets
- Shows Facebook Likes
- Post to Facebook pages
- Import Facebook Likes
- Improved threading of replies from social networks
- Improved Facebook open graph search for responses
- Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
- Complete re-architecture and rewrite to make platform more extensible (easier to add Google+ support, when their API is released)
- Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
- Set which accounts (including pages) are checked by default
- New queue system for checking for social comments on posts
- Better support for shortened URLs
- Delay broadcasting comments to social networks until they have been approved
- Delay broadcasting future posts to social networks until they have been published
- New authentication scheme for improved security
- Smart detection of retweets as understood by humans (where possible)
- Check for social comments via admin bar
- Check for social comments via posts list screen
- Added “time until next check” (in a human friendly format) to the social comments box for each post
- Allow editing of social broadcast messages for scheduled posts
- Directly imported tweets (by URL) are approved immediately (not held for moderation)
- Don’t import private tweets as comments
- Refactored personal vs. global broadcasting accounts, with defaults available for each
- Improved admin UI
We’re pretty excited about this update as it makes a plugin that we already loved even better. Oh, and Social is open source. You can fork it on Github and make your own contributions.
