Not too long ago when we did a large redesign of our website, one of the goals we set for the staff bio pages was to inject some personality and freshness (no pun intended) into the content. We did this by extending WordPress to easily include the social profile information for a team member. You can see an example of a Twitter stream on my bio page.
Originally we built this feature right into WordPress as a shortcode, but recently decided (after reusing it on a few projects) that it should be a packaged up in a plugin that we can share with the community.
Last week, our Lead Developer, Dave Romero, and I sat down to create and release Fresh Tilled Soil’s first official WordPress Plugin: Social Shortcodes.
Using the Plugin
The plugin can currently be downloaded on Github under the GNU license and dropped into your /wp-plugins directory, then activated. We expect it to be available via the Plugins Directory shortly.
It allows you to use the shortcode syntax: [twitter title="Title For Tweets" user="YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE" count="5"] to output tweets into a page, post, or theme. We’re currently only supporting Twitter, but Github and Dribbble are soon to follow, along with any explicit requests.
Update:
This plugin is now available through the WordPress Plugin Directory!