Features – Friends WordPress Plugin

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 for which a viable means exists to retrieve the content.

You can turn your favorite blog into your personal newsletter by receiving full-post notification e-mails while using feed rules to ignore posts you are not interested in.

But it is centered around users; you can have multiple feeds per person, even on social networks (parsing capabilities provided by plugins)

Use the Customizer to adapt it to your liking

Categorize incoming content with Post Formats and view all posts of a certain format across your friends.

Use rules to filter incoming content (sometimes you’re not interested in everything your friends do)

Friends users are plain WordPress users with low privileges

A Friend Request is accepted in the users screen. Delete the user to reject it or accept the request to make them a friend

Watch how Friendship Requests and private posts work

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.

Open Source

The Friends Plugin is open source and GPL2 licensed. Contributions and plugins welcome, see our Github repository at https://github.com/akirk/friends

Install now on your WordPress

More Demos

Consume the Web Your Way

Plugins

Currently, these plugins for the Friends Plugin are available:

Fraidyscrape Parser: subscribe to everything Fraidycat supports
RSS Bridge Parser: subscribe to a selection of supported feeds from RSS Bridge
Autoresolve Links: automatically convert shortened links (like in posts coming from Twitter) into long links or embeds where suitable, uses the Embed library
Send to E-Reader: automatically send (selected) incoming posts to your E-Reader (Kindle or Pocketbook)

You can install these plugins from the Friends Plugin section in wp-admin.

The Friends plugin has been created by Alex Kirk.