WordPress is web service which can be used to create a beautiful website or blog. The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers and when you are ready for more there are thousands of plug-ins and themes that are available to transform your site into almost anything that you can imagine. It is now the largest self hosted blogging tool in the world. WordPress is an open source project which means you can use it free for anything without paying any license fee.
WordPress can be completely customized. There is a service called WordPress.com which lets you to get started with a new and free WordPress based blog in seconds. It has evolved to be used as a full content management system and so much more through thousands of themes, widgets and plug-ins. WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant , well architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MYSQL and licensed under the GPL and is the Official successor of b2/cafelog.
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc have their own API to connect to the WordPress blog. Let us first see how to connect using Facebook Connect.
You should have a facebook profile for doing this. If you don’t have create one and move to Facebook Developers page to create Facebook application.
Facebook application is required to provide a secured authentication and manage Facebook members for your website.
Step1: Go to the Facebook Developers page and Click on the “Start” button.
Step2: Then login to “Facebook Developers Application” and add it to your application.
Step3: Once you do that you can use the “Set up new application” button. Then keep the settings page open for reference to the API key. Then get the Facebook Connect Plug-in, extract, upload and install it in your WordPress plug-in. Once it is done you need to check it out to see whether it’s working or not.
Step4: Now go to WordPress “Admin->Settings->Facebook Connect” and set the options, add your API key and secret key from the Facebook Application page.
Step5: For allowing users to send comments you need to enable comment Auto Approval.
Step6: Once this is done, click the “Update Options” button. After updating, go to the comment templates section of the page and click on “Create Template” button to create basic feed template for users Facebook mini-feed.
Step7: Then go to WordPress “Admin-> Appearance -> Widgets” for adding the Facebook Connect Widget to the sidebar and saving your sidebar settings you are finished with the process.
Thus you have added the plug-in to your system and integrated the functions to your blog.
For connect the WordPress account to Twitter you have Twitter Connect.
First install the plug-in and Register the blog on Twitter.com and retrieve your consumer key and consumer secret key. Plug those items into Twitter’s configuration page and you will have a fully independent application. When your readers wish to comment on a post, they just need to click on a button and enter their twitter credentials to identify themselves. You will see their Twitter avatar alongside the comments if you have setup avatar support on the blog.
