If you look up the word Digital curation on Internet you can read the following definition on Wikipedia: Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use.
That’s what the plugin in our article today is about: Curation. Gathering content from different sources and combine them into one.
There are different ways to put together a curated feed. You can do it manually, which is time-consuming work, or you can let a WordPress plugin aggregates your selected sources. You are probably aware that there are a lot of RSS aggregator plugin to choose from. But today, let’s take a closer look at a plugin named Flow-Flow.
Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream Plugin
With Flow-Flow you can really boost and display social feeds in a beautiful responsive grid with filters and live search. It’s easy to add many combinations of social feeds, such as Facebook feed, Instagram feed, and Twitter feed and mix them in the same grid.
Flow-Flow Social Stream is a premium WordPress soldier in CodeCanyon for a low and very affordable price. With Flow-Flow you can easily create awesome and beautiful social feeds that really stand out from the crowd.
The plugin includes all the major social feeds such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare, WordPress, YouTube, RSS and more.
How Flow-Flow Works
Create a stream or multiple socials streams in Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream admin dashboard and copy generated shortcodes and put these shortcodes in any block on any page of your site. For example, you want to include in one stream 3 twitter accounts, 1 twitter hashtag, 2 Google+ accounts and 5 facebook feeds. No problem!
When a social stream is shown the first time, it’s got cached (takes more time for initial caching but then it will show blazingly fast) and rest of visitors see this cache for cache lifetime. The plugin includes a special compact mode for narrow blocks like a sidebar.
Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream Features
- Smart Server Caching: Grid loads almost instantly. No need to load data every time.
- Seamless API Connection: Connect Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare with one click!
- Social Sharing Buttons: Drive the interaction and user involvement!
- CSS3 Transforms Animation: Shows the best performance and speed.
- Lightbox Galleries: Fantastic looking with attractive animations. Smart media preloading.
- Responsive Design: With swipes support for sliding on mobiles.
- Highly Customizable: Change colors, width/margins, design templates etc.
- Video Support: For YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram.
- Approval System: Preview posts before publish!
Wrapping Up
Flow-Flow is a really great and cool WordPress plugin to create and display social feeds in beautiful ways. The plugin is very flexible and comes with many configuration options. With its affordable price Flow-Flow is a true bargain.
For those of you who want to try Flow-Flow, there is actually a free version on WordPress.org, but with limited features. Download Flow Flow Social Stream and take it for a test drive.
If you want to have many more features and a better opportunity to add and configure more streams socials, don’t hesitate to upgrade to the premium version. Links can be found below.
