Today we've got not 1, not 2 — but 4 (okay, well 3 and a half) new plugins to announce. Social Feeds, Social Login, Social Poster and Social Share are our new social suite of plugins to get your site in the best social space it can.
But before we dive into what each plugin offers, to pair with the social plugins, we're also releasing a Craft module called Auth.
The Auth Craft Module#
Simply put, this module aims to abstract the intricacies of OAuth to make authentication a breeze.
As we've been working on our social plugins (and some others like Formie), we were writing a lot of the same bits of code when it came to interacting with third-party APIs. In particular, a lot of duplicated, boilerplate code to be able to connect to OAuth-based providers, store tokens, handle refresh tokens, and more. So we decided to take all those bits and add them to a module of its own. If you've ever worked with OAuth, you might know some of the pain with the lack of consistency from provider to provider, having to store tokens, dealing with refresh tokens and more.
However, it's not for your regular Craft users to install as a plugin, as this is a Craft module, which can be used in your Craft projects alongside other modules, or in Craft plugins (like our social plugins, Formie and more). Tokens are stored in a centralised database table, and all the required boilerplate code for handling the OAuth handshake is taken care of for you. But there is no client-friendly interface for managing things, it's purely for PHP developers.
It's a layer on top of the excellent league/oauth2-client (opens new window) package and supports 80+ popular social media and similar platforms right out of the box. That means, if you want to connect to a third-party provider out there, chances are Auth is ready to go to make that happen. Of course, you can also register your own.
If you're a keen module creator or a plugin developer and want to use OAuth in your next project, take a look at Auth!
Auth (opens new window) is an open-source, free package.
Social Feeds#
Social Feeds is a simple concept — being able to grab content from social media providers and display it on your site. Sure, you can embed tweets from Twitter, videos from YouTube and updates from Facebook using their embed functionality. But what Social Feeds does differently is give you complete control over the presentation of this content, and provide a means to combine them into a single "feed" of content. Picture a timeline of updates from multiple social media channels for a client.
You can choose to either display content from a single provider, or combine them into one, so the choice is yours. Currently supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube — but you can of course register your own. Powered by the Auth (opens new window) module, there are plenty of providers that it can be expanded to.
We've also added intelligent caching and ready-to-go templating so you can get to showing your content.
Social Feeds (opens new window) is available today for Craft 4 for $59.
Social Login#
Social Login adds SSO (Single Sign-On) capabilities to your Craft site to let your users login or register via their social media accounts like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and loads more. It's also a handy plugin to use when you want to "connect" user accounts to these providers, along with helpers for calling APIs.
Out of the box, it supports 60+ platforms to use as a login provider, as well as mapping profile data from the provider to Craft user fields. You'll have full control over how the login buttons look, as well as be able to provide both the control panel and front-end login.
As a bonus, once authenticated with the provider, there are helper classes to use the provider APIs to fetch any sort of data you like.
Social Login (opens new window) is available today for Craft 4 for $59.
Social Share#
Social Share is a collection of helpers for showing share dialogs, share counts, follower counts and social media buttons on your site. It supports over 80+ providers out of the box (although not all can show share and follower counts).
It might be a simple plugin, but will save you from having to copy social media SVGs from project to project, and maybe even save some development time with easy theming and customisation.
Social Share (opens new window) is available today for Craft 4 for free.
Social Poster#
The not-so-new plugin — Social Poster has been given a radical revamp, with plenty of changes. If you're unfamiliar with this plugin, Social Poster can auto-post your entry content to social media channels. Have a blog post you want to be pushed to Twitter or Facebook as soon as it's published on your website? Social Poster will publish that content to social media for you.
Now relying on the Auth module to handle authentication, Accounts and Providers are now combined. This allows you to post to multiple providers instead of the previous single instance.
We now also support posting to Instagram! Facebook has been given an overhaul as well, and both do not require a Facebook app submission (we can all breathe a sigh of relief at that).
Currently supports posting to Facebook, Instagram, Linked.in, and Twitter.
Social Poster (opens new window) is available today for Craft 4 for $59.
Up next...#
Stay tuned, as we've got some more announcements on the way!