Largo Project Sites Tweet Like The NY Times With New WordPress Plugin

Last week the New York Times rolled out a new feature to make it easier for readers to share notable quotes to Twitter from their story about auditioning for Saturday Night Live. This generated a fair amount of interest in news design circles.

A new WordPress plugin makes it easy to tweet selected excepts from stories.
A new WordPress plugin makes it easy to tweet selected excepts from stories.

Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab liked what he saw and uncovered a WordPress plugin that does something very similar. After modifying it a bit for use on the Nieman Lab site, Yuri Victor of the Washington Post contributed some additional features and this afternoon I thought I would customize it just a bit further and make it available to all of INN's Largo Project sites.

A quick sidenote: If you're not familiar with Project Largo, it's INN's responsive WordPress framework we've developed to help our members quickly get up and running with top-notch websites powered by WordPress that look great on any device. It's fully open source so even if you're not a member of INN you can grab the code here or get in touch if you would like to learn more.

For the Largo sites that INN hosts, this new tweetable text feature is already active on your site. If you use Largo but host elsewhere you can grab our custom version of the plugin here.

The basic usage is as follows:

Schardt says that [tweetable]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

Optionally, you can include an alt tag in the shortcode if you want the text of the tweet to be different than the exact text you're highlighting:

Schardt says that [tweetable alt="This is actually the text that will show up in the tweet."]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

You can also add hashtags to the tweet:

Schardt says that [tweetable hashtag="#journalism #publicmedia"]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

Or add an @username to use as the "via" source of the tweet:

Schardt says that [tweetable via="INN"]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

(For sites using Largo this will automatically populate with your organization's Twitter @username if you have added it on the Appearance > Theme Options page.)

And the result looks like this .

Give it a try and let us know what you think!