WordPress bloggers worldwide can now rejoice as they get yet another platform to publish their stories online. This comes after the social networking giant Facebook came up with a plugin essential for spreading news of stories, social publishing, and individual mentions.
Facebook engineers and open source partners developed the “Facebook for WordPress” plugin. Users of the Web publishing service can now add in Facebook features via the new plugin.
The new feature requires no coding and the plugin is mobile-friendly. It also supports internationalization.
Once the plugin is installed, users can cross-post content published to WordPress to the Facebook Timeline and the Pages they manage.
Facebook engineer Matt Kelly said in a blog post yesterday users can as well mention the names of the Pages and friends as they post to distribute their contents further.
WordPress is one of the most used online publishing platforms powering 16.6 percent of all sites.
A poll by Pingdom in April revealed 49 percent of the top 100 blogs in the world use WordPress, including CNN Political Ticker, Boing Boing, ArtsBeat, Grist, Hollywood Life, and several blogs for The New York Times. In distant second place are custom blogs with 14 percent.
According to CNET News, some of these blogs are already using the plugin to reach more readers.
WordPress’s move over the last one year to improve usability and flexibility for bloggers includes addition of a new feature called WordAds, which lets users make money by allowing ads to appear on their blogs, and create free mobile apps that enables users to make text and image updates to their blogs using a mobile device.
According to Pingdom, many of the users who once used the previously popular platforms TypePad, Moveable Type, and BlogSmith have now shifted to WordPress.
Pingdom also found that over the last three years, WordPress has enjoyed a 32 percent increase in users.
Facebook names the following social plugins as available as WordPress widgets:
- Activity Feed: Indicates to the readers the friends’ activities on the site including likes and comments.
- Recommendations: Offers readers personalized suggestions for pages on the sites they might like.
- Customisable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons.
- Comments Box: Makes it easy for readers to comment on the user’s site and post back to Facebook. The plugin also features automatic SEO support for Facebook Comments, so search engines can index them to improve the visibility of the user’s site.
