After several months of development, we're pleased to announce the initial release of a plugin that will help publishers automatically insert widgets in the middle of posts: the Super Cool Ad Inserter Plugin (SCAIP, for short).
SCAIP creates widget areas that are inserted programmatically into every post after every Nth paragraph.
You can then fill the widget areas that SCAIP creates with ads, newsletter signup forms, donation messages, other calls to action, related posts widgets, or really anything else that fits in a WordPress widget (including the default text/html widget).
To see the plugin in use, check out Religion News Service, which uses another one of our plugins, DoubleClick for WordPress, to insert ads within posts after every few paragraphs. The Cornell Daily Sun uses WordPress text widgets to display ads within posts using another ad network.
Another example is this screenshot, which shows the plugin in use in the WordPress.org Twenty Thirteen theme, inserting image widgets. Anything contained in a WordPress widget can easily be inserted by SCAIP.
Ads are normally inserted automatically, but the plugin also supports shortcodes to allow manual placement of the widget areas within posts, and per-post overrides to disable automatic ad placement.
To learn more about what the plugin is capable of, check out the docs or download the plugin and try it out! We're eager for your suggestions, bug reports and pull requests on GitHub or in the open tech channel on the INN Slack.
Developers will be happy to learn that the plugin is easy to integrate with themes. Our Largo WordPress theme required no changes to support SCAIP, and we believe that is the case with other themes.