Introducing the Social Profiles Plugin

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Right on the heels of announcing my first plugin, Customize Your Community, I’m proud to announce that the ever talented Joost de Valk and I joined forces again to bring you a second plugin we’ve named Social Profiles.

I wanted a way to give my community members more exposure than just a link to their website. I figured the best way was to give you the ability to showcase your profiles in addition to your website link at the social sites most common in my community. And we’ve made it a free plugin (once again though, donations never hurt) so you can do the same for your users.

The default ten social networks and forums currently included are Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Furl, MySpace, Newsvine, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Twitter. The plugin admin panel allows you to show the networks of your choosing via text links or graphical links (your choice) and even has an option to add a nofollow attribute to the links generated by Social Profiles.

The plugin also comes with an include file (step by step details and examples for adding networks can be found in the customization section of the Social Profiles plugin page). the sky is the limit as long as the network/forum has a standard user profile link that only changes by username.

As an example, if you visit login to Sugarrae and visit your user profile page, you’ll see the option to fill out three new fields at the bottom underneath Social networking. On my site, the three networks I’ve chosen to showcase are Twitter, Sphinn and Webmasterworld - all commonly used sites by my readership. Twitter comes pre-configured in the Social Profiles plugin while Sphinn and Webmasterworld, because they were niche networks/forums, were added by myself via an include written specifically to allow you to add niche networks important to your site and your readership.

To see the plugin in action, check out the comments below. If a user hasn’t filled in the fields under the social networks heading, none will appear. If they only fill out some, but not all, only the ones they’ve added a username for will appear.

See the Social Profiles plugin page for full details. I hope you guys enjoy this plugin as much as Joost and I already are.

Edited to add:

TheMadHat suggested I add to this post that you can use both Social Profiles and CYC on your blog without *requiring* registration for all commenters.

WordPress gives you two options under Settings > General. One is to allow anyone to register, the other is to only allow comments from registered users. If you check allow anyone to register but do NOT check off registration being required to comment, then you can offer registration to those who wish to register and take advantage of listing their Social Profiles without requiring that ALL commenters be registered. The best of both worlds.

Tagged as: blogging, Social Profiles, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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Sugarrae runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme

If you’re a blogger looking for a professional prescence but don’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality that you wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise with a simple control panel. With the incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks, you can easily make your blog stand out from the crowd.

Thesis allows bloggers to make more professional customizations than they may have ever deemed possible due to lack of coding knowledge. The theme allows me to run Sugarrae more professionally, with a focus on monetization that is more targeted than I’ve ever been able to achieve with a theme before. You can find out more about Thesis below:

• Thesis Website and Demo
• Thesis Theme Review
• Thesis Tutorial: Hooks for Dummies