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Facebook announced an official WordPress plugin today for cross-posting content, enabling tighter, cleaner, and simpler integration between millions of WordPress blogs and Facebook. All I can say is: finally!
I’ve been using WordPress blogging software since before it was WordPress. Seriously.
Before there was WordPress there was b2/cafelog, around 2001 (if you remember that, you’re among the proud and the few). In 2003, Matt Mullenweg released WordPress, which today has grown from a simple piece of blogging software to the most popular choice for a content management system on the planet.
Facebook, you all know.
Integrating Facebook and WordPress has always been a little tricky. Over a thousand of the 19,812 plugins currently available for WordPress enable some form of connection with Facebook. Enterprising bloggers who wanted to be social would find one, download and install it, fiddle with Facebook connection settings, and pray. From personal experience I can tell you that not all plugins worked, and some failed in spectacular blog-up-your-blog fashion.
So an actual plugin from Facebook itself is a big deal.
What the Facebook for WordPress plugin does is cross-post content published on your blog to your Facebook timeline or Page. And, just like typing in a friend’s name in a Facebook status update, if you mention a friend by their Facebook name it will automatically put the post on your friend’s timeline as well.
This is a simple, clean plugin that does what most WordPress users need.
In addition, Facebook announced plugins that are now available as WordPress widgets — small, moveable components that WordPress bloggers can position wherever they want. The widgets include an activity feed, which shows your visitors what their friends are doing on your site, recommendations for the best pages and posts on your blog, a comments box, and customizable like, subscribe, and send buttons.
The new features are available on WordPress.com blogs, which see 600 million visitors a month, and on personally hosted blogs.
Image credit: ShutterStock
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