Social Bridge

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Social Bridge is a WordPress plugin that connects your website with social media platforms, importing comments, likes, and shares from social posts to display them on your WordPress site.

Features

• Integrates WordPress with Bluesky and Mastodon
• Supports plugin extensions for additional platforms
• Imports comments, likes, and shares from social media posts
• Displays social interactions as WordPress comments
• Shows shares as pingbacks
• Includes a block and shortcode to display user like avatars
• Periodic synchronization via WordPress cron
• Custom meta boxes in post editors to link social media posts

Configuration

Bluesky Integration

1. Go to Settings → Social Bridge and click on the Bluesky tab
2. Enter your Bluesky handle (e.g., username.bsky.social)
3. Generate an App Password in your Bluesky account settings and enter it in the plugin settings
4. Save changes

Mastodon Integration

1. Go to Settings → Social Bridge and click on the Mastodon tab
2. Enter your Mastodon instance URL (e.g., https://mastodon.social)
3. Generate an access token in your Mastodon preferences under Development → Applications
4. Enter the access token in the plugin settings
5. Save changes

Usage

Connecting Social Media Posts

1. When creating or editing a post/page, you’ll see platform-specific meta boxes in the sidebar
2. Paste the URL of your social media post in the appropriate field
3. Update the post
4. The plugin will automatically sync comments, likes, and shares from the social media post

Manual Sync

1. Edit a post that has connected social media posts
2. In the Social Interactions meta box, click the Sync button next to a platform
3. The plugin will immediately import any new interactions

Comment Appearance

In Settings → Social Bridge, you can configure how social media comments appear:

• Fully integrated: Comments look like native WordPress comments
• Styled differently: Comments retain their social media identity but appear in the same section
• Separate section: Social media comments appear below WordPress comments

Extending the Plugin

Social Bridge supports extensions for additional social media platforms. Developers can create add-on plugins that register new platform integrations using the provided API.

To create an extension:

1. Create a new plugin that depends on Social Bridge
2. Create a class that extends Social_Bridge_Integration
3. Implement the required abstract methods
4. Register your integration using the social_bridge_integrations filter

Example:

`php

// Register a new integration
function my_plugin_register_integration($integrations) {
$integrations[‘twitter’] = new My_Twitter_Integration();
return $integrations;
}
add_filter(‘social_bridge_integrations’, ‘my_plugin_register_integration’);
`

External Services

Social Bridge includes built-in integration for two social media platforms: Bluesky and Mastodon.
When enabled, Social Bridge interacts with the APIs of these platforms to retrieve data
from social media posts specified by authors on your site.

These integrations do not transmit any user data from your site to the third-party
platforms. However, they will use the authentication or API credentials you provide
in the Social Bridge settings to access the respective platforms.

The plugin will only communicate with these platforms when explicitly configured to
do so—such as when a post on your site includes social media links in the Social Interactions metabox.

After configured both in the plugin settings and on individual posts, Social Bridge will routinely
re-communicate with these platforms, in order to update its cache of social media comments, likes and shares.

You can review Bluesky’s privacy policies here
and here.

For Mastodon, each server maintains its own privacy policy. You should review the policy
of the specific server you use. As an example, the mastodon.social policy is
available here.