Great for having a personal archive of content sent through Ping.fm, displaying status updates in your sidebar, or starting a mobile photo blog. While there’s plenty of room for customizing the plugin, sane defaults ensure that 90% of people can get up and running quickly. Keep reading for a full li
PricingFree downloadThe WordPress.org download is free. Pro versions, add-ons or external services may cost extra.
CompatibilityRequires WordPress 3.0.
SourceWordPress plugins · Nov 5, 2026
01 / Source details
Aboutthistool.
Great for having a personal archive of content sent through Ping.fm, displaying status updates in your sidebar, or starting a mobile photo blog. While there’s plenty of room for customizing the plugin, sane defaults ensure that 90% of people can get up and running quickly. Keep reading for a full list of features below…
Minimum System Requirements
This plugin has required PHP 5 for quite a while, but the increased requirements below are in line with the new standard coming in WordPress 3.2. Other version of PHP/MySQL might work just fine, but I personally use even later versions of both for development and testing. The minimums listed below are just that—minimums. My advice is to use the latest stable versions you can get your hands on.
WordPress 3.0
PHP 5.2.0
MySQL 5.0.15
A Quick Note About Donations
Starting with version 2.0.0 of this plugin, I added a PayPal donation link to the information box in the upper-right corner of the page. Let me be clear: I’m not soliciting donations, there is no charge for this plugin, and you are not obligated to give me any money for any reason. However, people have asked me if they could donate, and I wanted to facilitate that if you feel so inclined.
I’ve spent countless hours developing and supporting this plugin, but it’s mostly a labor of love. I first created the plugin to meet my own needs, and it’s kind of taken off from there. If you feel that the plugin has been useful to you in some way, I’d be honored to take your money and spend it on gadgets and firearm accessories.
Ye Olde Features Liste
Works with Ping.fm’s Custom URL feature to collect blog entries, micro-blog entries, and status updates and post them to your blog.
Photos posted through Ping.fm can be downloaded to your own blog and displayed as part of a normal post. It’s a super-easy way to set up an awesome self-hosted mobile photo blog.
Status updates and micro-blogs can be administered through a native WordPress management screen while blogs are, well… normal blog entries! Every feature of this plugin is tightly integrated with WordPress to provide a native look and feel.
A beautiful settings page with predefined smart defaults and contextual help when you need it.
Status updates are posted to the sidebar and displayed with a widget. A standard template tag is also provided for those of you who are anti-widget.
The sidebar widget is customizable with the number of status updates to show and an optional string to prepend all updates with (e.g. you might use your first name if all your status updates begin with a verb like mine do: Matt is…). Sensible CSS and examples are provided for you to customize the look and feel of your widget.
Provides an RSS feed and permalinks for your pings so that you can share them with the rest of the world.
Blog entries and micro-blog entries can have certain metadata applied to them automatically. You can set the author, category, tags, and post status (published or draft) for all incoming pings.
All the cool features of Ping.fm: post to your self-hosted WordPress blog using SMS, IM, email, desktop gadgets, mobile apps, etc.
Displays status updates in an unordered list ( <ul> ). All parameters are optional.
Parameters
limit
The number of status updates to show. Default value is 10. Depending on your needs and the location on the page, a value between 5 and 15 is usually pretty reasonable.
prefix
Some text to display before every status update. Default value is nothing. This can be useful if all of your status updates begin with a verb. For example, you might post “going to the store” from Ping.fm. If your prefix is “Matt is”, the final output will be “Matt is going to the store”. Neat, huh?
permalink
Whether to show timestamps as permalinks, a la Twitter. The archive page is editable via the tmpl-single.php template file.
Example
If you’re using the Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress 3.0, you might put the following into your sidebar.php file:
Retrieves the single most recent ping (status update) from the database.
Return Values
A stdClass object representing the latest ping, if it exists. Otherwise, false. The object will contain the properties listed below. For more information, dig through the source of the WordPress get_posts() function.
A nicely-designed settings page stands at the ready to accept your input.Everything is clearly laid out and explained.More detailed help is only a tab click away at all times.The illustrious status widget. You feed it status updates, it feeds widgety goodness to all your blog's readers.A full-blown admin page to manage all your status updates and micro-blogs.
02 / Source details
Gettingstarted.
01Extract the .zip file you downloaded to a directory under /wp-content/plugins/. The default will be the full name of this plugin project, which is pingfm-custom-url-status-updates . Alternatively, you can search for this plugin from the WordPress admin area and install it that way, or just click here to use Mark Jaquith’s plugin installer tool.
02Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
03Go to WordPress Admin > Plugins > Ping.fm Settings to get your custom URL and then follow the instructions on that page to link up with your Ping.fm account. Essentially, you just want to copy and paste the given URL into your Ping.fm Custom URL settings. Feel free to change any other settings on that page (it is your blog, after all). If you need to specify a default category for incoming posts, and that category doesn’t exist yet, go and create it first, and then come back and select it.
04Head over to WordPress Admin > Design > Widgets and add the ‘Ping.fm’ widget to your sidebar. If you click the ‘Edit’ link in the activated widget, you’ll be able to configure a whole slew of options to your liking. If your theme is non-widgetized, or if you just have a bias against widgets for some reason, you can use the wp_pingfm_status() template tag instead. More information about that is on the (Other Notes)[other_notes/] page.
05Post something to your Ping.fm account and let the good times roll! If nothing shows up at first, it’s probably because you haven’t posted anything yet. (It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised.) Only updates made after you install the plugin will show up, and even then, only after you’ve told Ping.fm to post to your custom URL. And, on the Ping.fm side, be sure to check the appropriate boxes for the kinds of updates you’d like to send to your custom URL. Finally, if you don’t think your status updates are showing up, make sure the widget has been added to your sidebar and that you’ve saved the changes.
06For those about to ping, we salute you!
03 / Source details
Frequently asked questions.
Can I change the number of status updates displayed?
Yes, of course you can! Go to your sidebar widgets and hit the ‘Edit’ link for the Ping.fm widget. This is all mentioned in the installation instructions, but I can see that you’re the impatient type that never reads anything. I bet you didn’t read the owner’s manual for your car, either, huh?
Why am I not seeing any updates in my sidebar?
Well… have you posted any yet? Only status updates posted to Ping.fm after installing the plugin and after configuring the custom URL will show up on your blog. If you’re confident you’ve done everything right, there might be something else going on. You might have discovered a bug, or an “undocumented feature” as we software engineers like to call them. Send me some sugar at matt@mattjacob.com and I’ll see what I can do.
Why aren’t pings coming through to my site?
Read the question immediately preceding this one once more. Done? Now go through the checklist below and make sure everything is kosher:
Is your site blocked off from others using HTTP Basic Authentication or some other method? Do you have firewall rules restricting users to a certain IP range?
Are you using any WordPress plugins that limit outside access? I’ve seen problems related to the Bad Behavior plugin in the past.
Can you hit the “secret posting URL” from your browser? You should get an error message, which is a good sign that the plugin is installed and working.
Do you have some boxes checked over at the Custom URL Settings page? Next to Use for: , you need at least one of those options selected (preferably all three).
Under the main Ping.fm Service Settings , is the box checked next to the Post messages to Custom URL option? This is important.
If you’re only posting status updates or micro-blogs from Ping.fm, is the widget activated and placed somewhere?
Can I post blog entries or pages from my Ping.fm account?
The original answer was a defiant “get off my lawn, you damn kids!” That lasted for a whole point release. By popular demand—and thanks in no small part to Rocco and Vinny, who were sent to convince me—the ability to post blog entries has been available since 0.9.2. Support for creating pages might be added in a future release. Give the people want they want, right?
Will this plugin work with WordPress.com blogs?
Definitely not. That would be goofy, because WordPress.com blogs don’t allow plugins. Plus, Ping.fm already has support for WordPress.com hosted blogs anyway.
Can you add feature X, Y, and Z? And Q? And L?
I could add all kinds of features, but the real question is whether I should . The intent and operation of this plugin was meant to be simple, but go ahead and pitch your feature idea to me. If it’s not too outrageous and I think others would benefit from it, I’ll probably add it to a future version of the plugin.
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