Tag Archives: Social

New Social Web Foundation Launched with Automattic’s Support   – WP Tavern

[ad_1] The Social Web Foundation was officially launched on September 24, 2024, with a mission to foster a “growing, healthy, financially viable, and multi-polar Fediverse.” This non-profit organization is spearheaded by Evan Prodromou (Research Director), Mallory Knodel (Executive Director), and Tom Coates (Product Director) and is dedicated to uniting social networks through the open standard protocol, ActivityPub. The Fediverse is a collection of interconnected, decentralized social media platforms that communicate using open protocols, with ActivityPub—developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—as the primary standard. “Until now, no major organization has taken on advocacy for ActivityPub as its central goal. Many people have ideas about what the Fediverse needs to be bigger, safer, and easier to use. But the solutions they propose fall between the cracks of anyone implementer or service. We want the SWF to be the entity that takes on those jobs.”, said Evan Prodromou, often referred to as “The Father of the Fediverse.” Tom Coates emphasized the foundation’s straightforward goal: “Fundamentally, its goal is pretty simple – it’s there to help the Fediverse grow in a sustainable and healthy way that benefits everyone.” The Social Web Foundation is our best chance to establish the conditions in which the new social media operates with zero harm. – Mallory Knodel The foundation aims to address challenges within the ActivityPub ecosystem and support its growth, especially in the commercial sector. Key areas of focus include: People: Educating the public about the Fediverse and its benefits. Policy: Clarifying policy frameworks for international and federated networks. Protocol: Developing and maintaining open standards. Plumbing: Building the necessary infrastructure Thirteen prominent companies, including Automattic, Mastodon, Meta, Ghost, and Medium, are backing the foundation. Automattic & Fediverse Automattic’s involvement with the Social Web Foundation comes as no surprise, given its long-standing contributions to the Fediverse. Back in 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg expressed interest in bringing ActivityPub support to Tumblr. In 2023, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle and made the ActivityPub feature available across all WordPress.com plans. “Automattic is excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation and its mission. We’re eager to collaborate with the Foundation to expand platform diversity and enhance the support for various content types—especially long-form content—within the Fediverse, fostering greater interoperability across the ecosystem.”, said Matthias Pfefferle, Open Web Lead at Automattic. To know more about Automattic and Fediverse, check the YouTube series, The Fediverse Files.  [ad_2] Source link

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Jetpack Social Plugin Adds Paid Plan, Free Users Now Limited to 30 Shares per Month – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Jetpack has announced changes to its Jetpack Social plugin that may impact publishers who frequently share across social media networks. Previously, users could share an unlimited number of posts automatically via their connected social media accounts. Jetpack is shuffling its monetization strategy for this extension and has capped social sharing at 30 shares per month for the free tier. A new paid plan offers 1,000 shares and re-shares per month, starting at $1/month for the first month and is $10/month thereafter. As a concession, Jetpack is rolling the social previews and re-sharing into the free plan. With Jetpack Social, if a post is automatically shared to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, that counts as three shares. It’s easy to see how quickly these shares can rack up to where even a casual blogger might require a paid plan. Publishers that are used to being able to automatically share all their posts for free should be aware this change that limits them to to 30 shares per month. I would not be surprised to see some users switch to another social sharing plugin, as many others offer far more social networks and don’t limit the number of times users can share. Instead they opt to restrict re-sharing, scheduling, or the ability to connect multiple accounts per social network. Jetpack Social has a new team behind it focused on making the product better. In 2021, Automattic acquired the Social Image Generator plugin with plans to integrate it into Jetpack’s social media tools. This may make the product more compelling, since it currently doesn’t stand up well to the myriad of free sharing plugins out there. Jetpack only supports four social networks, but the team is working on expanding the plugin’s capabilities. The plugin’s development team also accepts feature suggestions on its GitHub repository. Version 1.4.0 of the Jetpack Social plugin moved the share limits code to the Publicize package and added a meter to show users how many shares they have remaining. Users on the free plan should notice these changes in their dashboards. [ad_2] Source link

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Automattic Acquires Social Image Generator Plugin, Plans to Integrate with Jetpack – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Automattic has acquired the Social Image Generator plugin, a commercial product that automatically creates social share images for WordPress content from a set of fully customizable templates. The plugin launched in February 2021, with a starting price of $39/year but is now closed to new sales. Daniel Post, the plugin’s creator, is joining Automattic to continue developing it as a new addition to Jetpack’s social media tools. Automattic is always on the prowl for companies that are doing something interesting in the WordPress ecosystem. The Social Image Generator plugin expertly captured a new niche with an interface that feels like a natural part of WordPress and impressed our chief plugin critic, Justin Tadlock, in a recent review. “Automattic approached me and let me know they were fans of my plugin,” Post said. “And then we started talking to see what it would be like to work together. We were actually introduced by Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks, who uses both our products.” The Social Image Generator plugin has always been a commercial-only product, which tends to limit a plugin’s reach within a market that has been so heavily trained on the freemium model. Its acquisition will undoubtedly get it into the hands of more WordPress users. “I briefly considered building a freemium plugin but I decided to focus on paid licenses to make sure I could provide great support to all users and, frankly, to see how well it would be received compared to a freemium plugin,” Post said. Current customers will be able to continue using the plugin “without any changes in the near term,” according to the announcement on the Jetpack blog. Those who have strong opinions about the long-term future of the plugin are encouraged to schedule a session with Jetpack Customer Research to open a dialogue. “I look forward to the future functionality and user experience improvements that will come out of this acquisition,” Jetpack General Manager James Grierson said. “The goal of our social product is to help content creators expand their audience through increased distribution and engagement. Social Image Generator will be a key component of helping us deliver this to our customers.“ I would not be surprised to see this plugin available on one of Jetpack’s paid tiers in the near future, alongside the Publicize module’s other paid features (scheduling social media posts, tracking and viewing sharing history, and re-sharing existing content). Social Image Generator makes WordPress content more engaging on social media, has built-in support for WooCommerce, and can be extended for use with other plugins. It’s a strategic acquisition where Automattic gains an engineer as well as a new way to make Jetpack subscriptions more compelling. “We are still figuring out our exact approach, but the initial plans are to integrate the Social Image Generator features with the existing Jetpack social tools like Publicize,” Post said. “The ability to see exactly what your social media post will look like before publishing it right from your WordPress site is incredible, and a big reason why I’m so excited about this acquisition.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Create Per-Post Social Media Images With the Social Image Generator WordPress Plugin – WordPress Tavern

[ad_1] It was a bit of a low-key announcement when Daniel Post introduced Social Image Generator to the world in February via tweet. But, when you get repped by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and the co-founder of WordPress uses your plugin (come on, Matt, set a default image), it means your product is on the right track. I am not easily impressed by every new plugin to fly across my metaphorical desk. I probably install at least a couple dozen every week. Sometimes, I do so because something looks handy on the surface, and I want to see if I can find some use for it. Other times, I think it might be worth sharing with Tavern readers. More often than not, I consider most of them cringeworthy. I have high standards. As I chatted with Post about this new plugin, I was excited enough to call Social Image Generator one of those OMG-where-have-you-been? types of plugins. You will not hear that from me often. Post quit his day job to venture out earlier this year, creating his one-man WordPress agency named Posty Studio. Social Image Generator is its first product. “I kept seeing tutorials on my Twitter feed on how to automatically generate images for your social media posts, but unfortunately, they all used a similar approach (Node.js) that just wasn’t suitable for WordPress,” said Post of the inspiration for the plugin. “This got me thinking: would it be possible to make this for WordPress? I started playing around with image generation in PHP, and when I got my proof of concept working, I realized that this might actually be something I should pursue.” In our chat over Slack, we actually saw the plugin in action. As he shared Coyier’s article from CSS-Tricks, the chatting platform displayed the social image in real-time. Auto-generated image appearing via Slack. Maybe it was fate. Maybe Post knew it would happen and thought it would be a good idea to show off his work as we talked about his project. Either way, it was enough to impress the writer who is unafraid to call your plugin a dumpster fire if he smells smoke. Post seems to be hitting all the right notes with this commercial plugin. It has a slew of features built into version 1.x, which we will get to shortly. It is dead simple to use. It is something nearly any website owner needs, assuming they want to share their content via social networks. And, with a $39/year starting price, it is not an overly expensive product for those on the fence about buying. How the Plugin Works After installing and activating Social Image Generator, users are taken to the plugin’s settings screen. Other than a license key field and a button for clearing the image cache, most users will want to dive straight into the template editor. At the moment, the plugin includes 23 templates. From Twenty Seventeen to Twenty Twenty-One, each of the last four default WordPress themes also has a dedicated template. After selecting one, users can customize the colors for the logo, post title, and more — the amount of customization depends on the chosen template. Browsing the plugin’s templates. Aside from selecting colors, users can choose between various logo and text options. They can also upload a default image for posts without featured images. Editing a template from Social Image Generator. When it comes time to publish, the plugin adds a meta box to the post sidebar. Users can further customize their social image and text on a per-post basis. Social image preview box on the post-editing screen. Once published, the plugin creates an image that will appear when a post is shared on social media. On the whole, there is a ton that anyone can do with the built-in templates. There is also an API for developers to create their own. For a first outing, it is a robust offering. However, there is so much more that can be done to make the plugin more flexible. Version 2.0 and Beyond Thus far, Post said he has received tons of positive feedback along with feature requests. Primarily, users are asking for more customization options and the ability to create and use multiple templates. These are the focus areas for the next version. With a 1,718% increase in revenue in the past month, it seems he might have the initial financial backing to invest in them. “I’ve started building a completely overhauled drag-n-drop editor, which will allow you to create basically any custom image you want,” he said. “It will be heavily inspired by the block editor, and I want to keep the UI and UX as close to the block editor as possible.” The new template editor would allow users to create multiple layers, an idea similar to how Photoshop, Gimp, and other image-editing software works. The difference would be that it can pull in data from WordPress. “For example, an ‘Image’ layer will have options such as height/width and positioning, as well as some stylistic options like color filters and gradient overlays,” said Post. “A ‘Text’ layer can be any font, color, and size and can show predefined options (post title, date, etc.) or whatever you want. You can add an infinite number of layers and order them however you’d like.” He seems excited about opening up new possibilities with an overhauled editor. Users could potentially create social image templates for each post type. A custom layer might pull in post metadata, such as displaying product pricing or ratings from eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce. “The prebuilt templates will still exist, similar to Block Patterns in the block editor,” said the plugin developer. “They will, however, serve as a starting point rather than the final product. I’ll also try to implement theme styling as much as possible. “The possibilities here are so endless, and I’m incredibly excited for this next part.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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