Announcing Version 1.0 of the Link Roundups Plugin

INN Labs is pleased to announce an important update to the Link Roundups plugin!

If you run a daily or weekly newsletter collecting headlines from around the state, region, or within a particular industry, the Link Roundups plugin will make it easier to build and feed your aggregation posts into MailChimp.

The Link Roundups plugin helps editors aggregate links from around the web and save them in WordPress as “Saved Links”. You can publish these curated links in a Link Roundup (more below), display Saved Links and Link Roundups in widgets and posts in your WordPress site, or push Link Roundups directly to subscribers via MailChimp. It's designed to replace scattered link-gathering workflows that may span email, Slack, Google Docs and spreadsheets and streamlines collaborations between different staffers.

Why might you want to use this plugin? Here are a few reasons:

  • It creates a single destination for collecting links and metadata
  • On sites that publish infrequently, it provides recently published (curated) content for your readers
  • Weekly roundup newsletters or posts are a great way to recap your own site's coverage and build and diversify your audience, which can increase donations

Saved Links

The central function of the Link Roundups plugin is the Saved Link. It's a way of storing links in your WordPress database, alongside metadata such as the link's title, source site, and your description of the link's contents.

A screenshot of the Saved Links interface, showing many saved links and their respective metadata: authors, links, descriptions, and tags.

Save to Site Bookmarklet

When WordPress 4.9 removed the "Press This" functionality, this plugin's bookmarklet broke. This release's updates to the Saved Links functionality include a renewal of the "Save to Site" bookmarklet, based off of the canonical Press This plugin's functions. If your site has the WordPress-maintained Press This plugin active, your site users will be able to generate new bookmarklets. We include instructions on how to use the bookmarklet in the latest release.

A screenshot of the "Save to Site" button and its copy button

Once you've accumulated a few Saved Links, you can display them on your site using the Saved Links Widget or start to create Link Roundups (see next).

Saved Links Widget

Common uses of this widget include "coverage from around the state" or "recommended reads" or "from our partners" links.

It's a good way to point your to expert coverage from newsrooms you partner with. With the ability to sort Saved Links by tag, you can easily filter a widget to only show a selection of all the links saved on your site. Here's how Energy News Network uses the widget:

A screenshot of the widget as it appears at Energy News Network, showing a selection of links from the last day.
A screenshot of the widget as it appears at Energy News Network, showing a selection of links from the last day.

Link Roundups

Link Roundups are one of the best ways to present Saved Links to your readers. Collect links with Saved Links, then create a Link Roundup post with the week's curated links. The person who assembles the Link Roundup doesn't have to deal with messy cut-and-paste formatting or composing blurbs — when your users create Saved Links, they're already adding headlines, blurbs, and sources.

Add some opening and closing text, and you're most of the way to having composed a morning or weekly news roundup.

Link Roundups are a custom post type with all the Classic Editor tools and an easy interface for creating lists of Saved Links. As a separate post type, they can be integrated into your site's standard lists of posts or kept separate in their own taxonomies. You don't have to integrate the roundups with your standard posts flow; it's why we provide a Link Roundups widget to fulfill your widget area needs.

MailChimp Integration

Link Roundups don't have to stay on your site. If you configure your site to connect to the MailChimp API and create a newsletter template with editable content areas, you can send a Link Roundup directly to MailChimp from WordPress.

From the Link Roundup editor, you can choose a mailing list, and create MailChimp campaign drafts, send test emails, and send drafted campaigns directly. If you'd rather open a draft campaign in MailChimp to finalize the copy, there's a handy link to your draft campaign.

A screenshot of a settings metabox: choose a campaign type of regular or text. Choose a list to send to: the Link Roundups Mailchimp Tools Test list, with the group "are they Ben" option chosen: "Ben". The campaign title will be "Test Title Three Title", the test subject will be "Test Title Three Subject", and the template will be "Link Roundups Test 2"
Here's the MailChimp settings for the Link Roundups campaign editor: Many of the controls that you'd want to use to create and send a draft campaign.

More information

For more information about how the plugin works, see the Largo guide for administrators, the plugin's documentation on GitHub, or drop by one of our weekly open office hours sessions with your questions. You can also reach us by email at support@inn.org.

If you already have the Link Roundups plugin installed, keep an eye out for an update notice in your WordPress dashboard. If you'd like to install it, download it from the WordPress.org plugin repository or through your site dashboard's plugin page.

This update was funded in part by Energy News Network and Fresh Energy, with additional funding thanks to the generous support of the Democracy Fund, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Fund, Open Society Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Link Roundups is one of the many WordPress plugins maintained by INN Labs, the tech and product team at the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Nerd Alert 38: Bert’s Pancake ‘n’ Pizza World

nerdalertfinal

Our thoughts are with everyone who loved Alison Parker and Adam Ward. #WeStandWithWDBJ7

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: News sites have gotten a bad reputation for being pretty miserable to use by overloading their pages with ads, popups, social buttons and other gadgets. Designer Brad Frost has documented a number of anti-patterns to avoid (make sure to turn on the bullshit).

  Ben: Don’t use .dev for development domains - it’s a real top-level domain now: http://nic.dev.

  David: This post explores the WordPress Transients API and use cases for leveraging it. Here's a great tutorial using them to push plugin updates from GitHub via the GitHub API.

  Kaeti: Why it’s important that we design tools with emotional intelligence.

  Bert: Would you patronize Bert's Pancake 'n' Pizza World?

This week we bid farewell to our summer apprentice Dani Litovsky Alcala who did great work with INN members on data projects! All the best, Dani!

You could be our next apprentice this fall or spring. Our apprentices are paid, trained, appreciated and awesome!

 

WE MADE A THING

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Many sites we work with collect links from around the web and then either present this feed of links on their sites in a widget or turn them into roundup posts and email newsletters.

To improve the workflow for curating and publishing these roundups, we've created a new WordPress plugin called Link Roundups. Now available on WordPress.org.

SOME OTHER STUFF

LISTEN: Stand by each other. Be excellent to one another.

COOK: Go crave these Quinoa lunch bowls. Not a joke.

WATCH: We always *knew* Android versions are delicious but...

GIF: Explore the world, bring a friend!

CatsRedCarFun

 

New WordPress Plugin: Link Roundups

Many sites we work with collect links from around the web and then either present this feed of links on their sites in a widget or turn them into daily (or weekly) roundup posts and email newsletters.

To improve the workflow for curating and publishing these roundups, we've created a new WordPress plugin called Link Roundups.

The plugin borrows some patterns and a bit of the original code from a plugin called Argo Links, but has been almost completely rewritten with a number of new features added (if you are a current Argo Links user, we've included an update script to help you migrate).

Features

Some of the key features of the plugin include:

bookmarklet-popup

A browser bookmarklet to collect links as you browse, add your own description, tags and then save the link directly to your WordPress site, all without having to leave the site you're on. This bookmarklet will also attempt to automatically pull in the title, source and a featured image for the links so you don't have to populate these fields manually.

Widgets for saved links and link roundups to display the links you've saved or your recently published roundups in any WordPress widget area.

published-roundupA WordPress custom post type called Link Roundups with a way to browse your saved links and compile roundup posts to be published on your site.

Integration with MailChimp to simplify the process of sending the roundup posts to your newsletter subscribers.

Plugin options to control the display of saved links in roundups, manually specify the anchor text to be used and a number of other nice enhancements to give you the flexibility to format link roundups the way you want.

Installation

You can find documentation and installation instructions on GitHub and the plugin is also now available from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

What's Next?

In our next release we plan to add the ability to share links you save directly to Facebook/Twitter at the same time as they are saved to your site, improve documentation and add a number of other features.

You can submit feature requests and see our plans for future releases on the project's GitHub repository. Feedback, bug reports and questions are most welcome!

Thanks!

Finally, we want to thank INN member Fresh Energy who funded some of the development of this plugin as part of our recent redesign of their Midwest Energy News site. Thanks also to Aspen Journalism for offering some helpful feedback.