A few weeks ago, I wrote about reclaiming short URLs using YOURLS. That post raised some interest among the CUNY Academic Commons team in having a URL shortener just for the Commons, with full integration into BuddyPress. So I emailed Ozh Richard, author of YOURLS, about the possibility of adding BuddyPress support to his official YOURLS WordPress plugin, YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter. He graciously accepted my offer to do the leg work.
Today I’m releasing the fruits of this collaboration: version 1.5 of YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter. YWTT 1.5 automatically detects when you’re running BuddyPress, and adds the following BP-specific features:
- Member and Group URLs – Generate short URLs for member profiles and for group home pages.
- A “pretty URL” setting – Instead of generating random URLs (like
http://blo.so/54), you can make member and/or group members ‘pretty’ (likehttp://blo.so/usernameorhttp://blo.so/groupname). - User customizability – Optionally, you can add new options under groups’
Admin > Group Settingsand members’Settings > Short URLallowing users to request a custom short URL of their choice. (This feature requires that you setYOURLS_UNIQUE_URLStofalsein your YOURLS configuration file.)
Down the road, I plan to flesh out BP-YOURLS functionality, with optional short URLs for forum topics, activity items, and so on.
I’ve also slipped full localization support into version 1.5. Send me your mo/po translation files if you’d like them to be distributed with the plugin.
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wow. very cool. I’ve recently chosen to ‘reclaim my short urls as well. This BP option really adds to the brandability for communities as well as control of all external links.
thanks for your contribution.
So, would this mean that members could request their own URL of, for example, bpsite.com/username and bpsite.com/groupname?
Or are the group short URLs automatically generated? If so, where do group admins/members find the group’s short URL?
It’s be cool if this could be integrated into Achievements, when, for example, a member uploads 100 photos, they’d unlock their own short username URL.
And what about URL statistics? Are group admins and members able to view their own short URL stats – such as bpsite.com/username+ ?
They are automatically generated. If you have the “pretty” setting turned on, then they’re generated as ‘username’ or ‘groupname’. Otherwise they are random.
It’s printed into the group/profile header.
Good idea. I’ll put a filter in the next version that would allow this to be built.
No, but it’s an interesting idea. The shortcoming of this would be that YOURLS only keeps track of visits to the short URL, so it wouldn’t be an accurate count of *all* visits.