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.
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Sugarrae runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme
If you’re a blogger looking for a professional presence 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:
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Now here’s a useful idea. Thanks, Rae!
Yeah, it was something I’d been wanting to do for a while… to be honest, I think it turned out to be more awesome then I’d ever pictured it in my head. ;-)
Looks like a great plugin to make your social presence better :)
Thanks Rae!
this is kickass thanks heaps rae (and joost)
Damn girl, what’s with all the socializing lately, you’re making me look like a recluse hermit serial killer again.
Wicked awesome plugin. What else is there to say?? Love it.
Very cool, does it work with Wordpress MU? I can imagine some cool uses if I can integrate it with BuddyPress.org.
Thanks!
I can digg this plug-in. What I find especially interesting about seeing it in action is seeing how consistent users are with profile names across networks.
Nice plug-in. Will definitely have to add to my list of must-have plug-ins.
Great idea. I’m trying it out right now.
Wicked! How easy was that? It works better than I expected. Rae/Joost, this one is a winner – congratulations.
you’re too good to us Rae. Sent my token donation to keep the gifts coming out of SugarRae Inc World HQ :)
Testing 1-2-3. :) Very cool plugin. Thanks for all you know and share. Thanks to Joost. Happy Birthday to your son.
Nice work! One of those, “so simple, why didn’t I think of it” things that will haunt other plugin developers.
Good thinking, this is highly useful for building a blog’s community!
cheers Rae,
I’m going to check this out shortly.
Hey sorry if this is a stupid question, but with CYC or Social profiles can you configure your backend so that registered users can write a page to be posted on your blog and you would be able to authorise it before it goes live?
@jackmo that more has to do with giving a user the ability to be a contributor or author on your blog. The role manager plugin might be the solution for you.
Very good plugin. This will definitely coming up on my blog soon.
This is great! I’m looking forward to testing it out.
I downloaded and installed this plugin, but can’t seem to get it to display on my comments page. The settings page appears and seems to work. Then I added the php code in comments.php in my theme, but no joy… any thoughts? I can see the social site data in mysql, but it’s not showing up in posted comments.
Here’s the code I added to my theme:
user_id); ?>