Strengthen your blog’s community: Google Friend Connect now available for Wordpress
I recently developed a plugin to add Google Friend Connect social features to WordPress blogs. This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, AIM and Netlog and comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.
When a user authenticates as described above, a wordpress account is created for him. You can later add or remove permissions to the user from both, wordpress and friend connect site administration.
If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments, this is achieved by rendering Google Friend Connects Comments gadget instead of the classic wordpress comments form.
In this case, no wordpress account is created, since the comments are handled by Google Friend Connect as well as the comments moderation.
Regardless of whether the Google Friend Connect comments are enabled or not, comment entries display the user profile picture and grant access to the user’s profile, both from the external account the user is authenticated with. In addition, a set of social gadgets are available, such as Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global comments.
When recommendations are enabled, a “Recommend” button is displayed below your posts allowing the site members to choose the content they like most, the most popular posts will surface on top of the list within the recommendations gadget.
The blog activities such as posting content, or commenting on a post, are submitted to Google friend Connect activity stream, visible on the social bar.
All of the plugin features, as well as the color scheme, size, and labels of the social gadgets are easily configurable via admin panel, using regular WordPress admin interfaces. The plugin installation does not require any programming skills at all and you can get it at Google Code. To see this plugin in action visit either the WordPress with native comments demo or the WordPress with Friend Connect comments demo.