Plugin idea: Theneeds

  • Unknown's avatar
    theneedswidgets · Member ·

    Hi team,

    I’m one of the developers at Theneeds.com, wondering how to have our widget available for bloggers hosted on WordPress.com.

    Let me give you a bit of context. We have a widget for bloggers to embed a Twitter-like content stream with cool content from more than 100 different topics. The embedding code is pretty standard, + <script> tags, here are examples:
    http://www.theneeds.com/page/dev_widgets.html

    As you can imagine, we’re receiving a lot of requests from users with blogs hosted on WordPress.com, and our widget can’t be added.

    I went through the docs, and came here from:
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/

    I’d like to understand a bit better what is needed for a plugin to be added to WordPress.com (e.g., how many bloggers requests), and/or if there are other ways to be able to add our widget (e.g., via oEmbed). I found particularly interesting the way Medium.com is embedded, but I can’t find any documentation nor I can see anything related in the source code at WordPress.org.

    I’m open to any solution and willing to implement whatever is needed on our side.

    Best,
    Emanuele Cesena

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    Here is the possible rub. When I see these words embed a Twitter-like content stream with cool content from more than 100 different topics I think splogging tool.

    I have been here for 8 years and WordPress.com has meticulously avoided allowing us bloggers to use any means of auto-filling posts or pages with content sucked in from RSS Feeds and passing the kind of splogs created by that uninspired non-blogging off as a blog.

    Of all the blogging platforms I know of this one is outstanding in that it actually promotes original content blogging and is not a safe haven for sploggers. However, the recent trend towards embedding tweets, and this and that, etc. means we may see a turning of the tide as authentic blogging gets sucked down into the tidepools of duplicated content that IMNHO pollute the blogophere.

  • Unknown's avatar
    theneedswidgets · Member ·

    Hi, and thanks for the feedback on the idea.

    I was however more interested in the technical problem, to let users have the choice wether to add or not the widget. I understand your opinion and vision but, with all respect, if this would be 100% shared you wouldn’t have a Twitter, Text and RSS widgets available by default. Moreover, I’m getting curious on how Medium.com achieves embed, since you can just copy&paste a link, and their widget magically appear (no docs, no trace in the source code available at wordpress.org).

    Specifically on Theneeds content, I agree with you that our content is NOT original, but it’s fresh, curated and ranked by a community. All things that, imho, make it absolutely complementary to the blogger’s content. I also agree with you that having my own tweets (where usually I do promote my blog posts) in my blog is a non-sense… we hope to create something better!

    And this brings me back to my tech questions. Again, thank you for the response!
    Emanuele Cesena

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    This thread is tagged for a Staff response. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and please be patient while waiting.

  • Unknown's avatar
    theneedswidgets · Member ·

    I’m subscribed. Thank you very much for your interest and help.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    You are welcome.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jackiedana · Member ·

    Thanks for submitting your idea.

  • Unknown's avatar
    theneedswidgets · Member ·

    Thanks to you… thought I’d like to know more about what could I do move forward (if there’s anything I can do) with respect to the points I’ve outlined (create a plugin, work with oembed, understand how medium.com performs auto-embed…).

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