Social Digest for WordPress

Social Digest is an automated content curation, media optimization, and publishing plugin for WordPress. It aggregates your updates across decentralized social networks (Bluesky and Mastodon) and compiles them into structured, publication-ready WordPress digest articles.

🌟 Key Features

1. Tabbed Admin Interface & Workflow Separation

• Settings Tab: Centralized, persistent configuration for sources, scheduling, media compression, and article taxonomy.
• Editorial & Staging Queue Tab: Dedicated staging environment to preview incoming draft updates, attach custom per-item commentary, and pin lead stories.
• Actions & Diagnostics Tab: Operational hub with manual import triggers, cutoff timestamp resets, network connection health checks, and non-destructive dry-run simulations.

2. Editorial Workflow, Staging & Post Pinning

• Digest Staging Queue: Review pending social posts before final publication.
• Custom Per-Item Commentary: Attach custom notes, reactions, or takeaways above individual social embed cards.
• Lead Story Pinning: Pin highlight updates to appear at the very top of the digest regardless of chronologic sorting.
• Inline Excerpt Truncation: Configurable character fold limit with expander toggle to prevent massive threads from dominating article layouts.

3. Media Optimization & WordPress Storage Hygiene

• Modern Media Conversion: Converts sideloaded images to .webp or .avif formats on the fly to save disk storage.
• Local Asset & Avatar Caching: Caches remote user avatars and link preview thumbnails locally to avoid broken links if third-party posts are deleted.
• Responsive srcset Sizes: Generates standard WordPress image derivatives (medium, large, medium_large, thumbnail) for fast mobile rendering.

4. Newsletter & Syndication Distribution

• RSS-Only Mode: Publish digests exclusively to your RSS feed and newsletter subscribers (e.g. Mailchimp, Substack, Brevo) without showing them on your public front-end blog stream.

5. Admin Health, Network Diagnostics & Simulation

• Dry-Run / Simulation Preview: Test imports instantly without publishing posts, downloading images, or updating timestamp markers.
• Connection Health Checks: Instant latency and HTTP status monitoring for Bluesky AT Protocol and Mastodon endpoints.

6. Multi-Network Social Ingestion & Deduplication

• Bluesky (AT Protocol): Connects directly via public AT Protocol endpoints using your handle or DID.
• Mastodon (ActivityPub): Connects to any Mastodon or Fediverse instance via public API endpoints.
• Multi-Signal Cross-Posting Detector: Accurately detects identical cross-posted updates across platforms via URL stem inspection, external link card URI matching, common prefix/substring containment, and relative text similarity.
• Configurable Duplicate Resolution Strategies:
  • Prefer Mastodon if longer, otherwise Bluesky (Default/Recommended): Compares clean character count (excluding hashtags and URLs) and embeds Mastodon when it contains more text; otherwise defaults to Bluesky.
  • Longest text wins: Selects whichever platform wrote more clean commentary.
  • Always prefer Bluesky: Strictly embeds the Bluesky post.
  • Always prefer Mastodon: Strictly embeds the Mastodon post.
• Strict Single-Embed Output: Only the single winning post is embedded in the WordPress digest article body.
• Intelligent Tag Harvesting: If the winning post lacks hashtags that the losing post possessed, those missing tags are harvested to enrich the WordPress post taxonomy.

7. Content Framing & Formatting

• Visual Header/Footer Editor: Unified TinyMCE visual editor with a dedicated Insert Post Splitter (``) button.
• SEO & Search Visibility: Optional data-nosnippet tagging on header and footer elements.

🚀 Installation

1. Clone or Download:

   git clone https://github.com/BradLinder/social-digest.git

   Or download the .zip archive from the Releases page.

2. Upload to WordPress:

   • Copy the social-digest directory to /wp-content/plugins/social-digest/.
   • Alternatively, in the WordPress Admin go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin and select the .zip file.

3. Activate:

   • Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and click Activate under Social Digest.

4. Configure:

   • Navigate to Settings > Social Digest in your WordPress dashboard to configure your accounts, staging preferences, and formatting options.

⚙️ Configuration Overview

📁 Repository Structure

social-digest/
├── social-digest.php             # Main plugin bootstrap and orchestration file (v5.3.4)
├── readme.txt                    # WordPress.org plugin standard readme
├── README.md                     # GitHub documentation and user guide
├── roadmap.txt                   # Completed roadmap features and release log
├── LICENSE                       # GNU General Public License v2.0
└── assets/
    └── js/
        └── social-digest-editor.js # TinyMCE editor plugin for digest split markers

📄 License & Credits

• Author: Brad Linder
• License: Distributed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later (GPLv2+). See the LICENSE file for details.
• WordPress Compatibility: WordPress 6.0 to 6.7+; PHP 7.4 to 8.3+.