Friends
With the Friends Plugin for WordPress you can now consume content your friends (or other blogs) create, and interact with your friends on their blogs with seamless authentication.
As soon as you become friends, both of you get accounts on each other’s WordPresses that you can then use post comments or read private posts. You’ll use the account on your friend’s server just by clicking on their post on your own Friends page.
You can also use the Friends plugin as a capable self-hosted feed reader. With added parser support through plugins you can subscribe to all sorts of content, also on other social networks, allowing you to see what your friends do across social network borders.
A “friend” in the Friends Plugin doesn’t need to be a real friend, you can also subscribe to any site you like and that provides a viable means for retrieving your content.
You can turn your favorite blog into your personal newsletter by receiving full-post notification e-mails, using feed rules to filter out content you are not interested in.
Philosophy
The Friends Plugin was built to make use of what WordPress provides:
- You use the WordPress infrastructure (Gutenberg or Classic Editor, what you prefer) to create your posts.
- If a post is private, only logged-in friends can see it. They can only log in through their own Friends plugin on their blog.
- Therefore, your friend is just a user on your WordPress blog, their posts are theirs, you can delete them to unfriend them.
- No extra tables: The Friends plugin just uses a post type, options and some taxonomies to store its data. When you delete the plugin, your WordPress will be slim like before.
In future, I could see mobile apps instead of talking to a third party, to talk to your own blog. It will have your friends’ posts already fetched. Maybe the apps will be specialized, like Twitter or Instagram, where you’d only interact with and create posts in the specific post format.
The logo was created by Ramon Dodd, @ramonopoly. Thank you!
Documentation for the plugin can be found on the GitHub project Wiki.
Development of this plugin is done on GitHub. Pull requests welcome. Please see issues reported there before going to the plugin forum.
Download & install the zip archive
The plugin package installer can be downloaded from the WP2E project tab called “code”.
1 – Select the version to download if this option is available otherwise the “latest” version of the main plugin will be used.
2 – After downloading the zip archive install the plugin package installer in you local environment and activate the script from the plugin list.
3 – Under the section “Plugins” of the admin dashboard you should see a new “Dependencies & Licenses” link. Follow the instructions from this panel to finalize the installation of the missing dependencies.
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- Give a name to your project
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- Download the Installer Package
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- Install & activate the plugin locally
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- Install the suggested dependencies
Tips: Use the WP2E panel to add/suggest new dependencies to the local installation. Press F5 in the list of dependencies if the changes are not displayed right away.