Better sharing of WordPress posts to Mastodon

WordPress's Jetpack plugin allows you to easily syndicate your blog to Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Email, and a few other services. But there's no native way to publish directly to your Mastodon feed.

This is a guide to how I got my blog to publish every new post to Mastodon with a nicely formatted preview. This uses Jan's "Share on Mastodon" plugin which you'll need to install and configure.

Once you've followed these instructions, you'll get a share which has a headline, excerpt, link, hashtags, and images. Ready? Let's go!

What it looks like

Here's a sample post shared onto Mastodon.

The Code

Add this to your theme's functions.php file.

 PHPadd_filter( 'share_on_mastodon_status', function( $status, $post ) {

    //  Create a short preview of the post

    $status = "New blogging from me!\n\n";

    $status .= "\"" . get_the_title($post) . "\"\n\n";

    $status .= get_the_excerpt($post);

    //  Remove the … forced by the excerpt and replace with the Unicode symbol

    $status = html_entity_decode($status);

    //  Add a link

    $status .= "\n\nRead more: " . get_permalink( $post );

    //  Add tags

    $tags = get_the_tags( $post->ID );

    if ( $tags ) {

        $status .= "\n\n";

        foreach ( $tags as $tag ) {

            $status .= '#' . preg_replace( '/\s/', '', $tag->name ) . ' ';

        }

    }

    $status = trim( $status );

    return $status;

}, 10, 2 );

If you're familiar with PHP, the code shouldn't contain too many surprises. The only confusing thing for me was needing to replace the hard-coded … with … as otherwise Mastodon treats it literally.

So, install "Share on Mastodon" plugin and get hacking!