SocialCrumbs: A Free WordPress Theme that Streams Social Activity Using IFTTT Recipes

With all of the content an average user generates across social media sites, it can be challenging to get a full view of all that activity. Let’s face it, your social media posts are scattered all over the web.

SocialCrumbs is a non-traditional, niche WordPress theme that aggregates all of your social media activity into one stream with the help of IFTTT recipes. The theme was created by Adam Ilter, a user interface designer and developer living in Istanbul. He designed a Pinterest-style display to output the social posts brought in by IFTTT. The masonry grid is responsive and colorful with posts featuring icons for each social network.

You can view a live demo of SocialCrumbs at adem.social.

In order to use the theme, you need to sign up for IFTTT and set up recipes for all the social accounts you want to include in the stream. The theme’s readme.txt files includes a list of 19 recipes that Ilter has pre-configured, with a checklist of many more planned.

Certain networks have multiple options. For example, you can choose to include Twitter tweets and/or favorites:

• twitter-tweet-write https://ifttt.com/recipes/189363
• twitter-tweet-favorite https://ifttt.com/recipes/189331

It can take up to 15 minutes for the content to appear in your theme after posting to the social network, as most IFTTT recipes check for new trigger data at that interval.

It’s important to note that this theme is hosted on GitHub, not officially supported, and is an example of a fun, experimental concept that relies on IFTTT. As such, it doesn’t includes a single post template but rather outputs as an index. SocialCrumbs is not yet capable of providing a comprehensive archive for social media posts, so it’s not a theme you would use if you intend to record all of your social activities for preservation.

One might argue that this kind of functionality is better housed in a plugin. In that case you might want to take a look at the Social Streams or WP Social Stream plugins on WordPress.org. WP Social Stream is based on jQuery Lifestream, as opposed to IFTTT. The methods of retrieving social posts vary from plugin to plugin, depending on how you want to fetch, display, and store that content.

The most ideal use for the SocialCrumbs theme would be where you dedicate a subsite to its display, i.e. for showing social media posts surrounding an event or brand. If it was forked to include the ability to make the social media content searchable and sortable, SocialCrumbs would be even more useful beyond a simple visual display of activities.

In its current state, the theme is a nice example of IFTTT and WordPress working together to create a configurable social stream that aggregates activity from multiple networks to a single page of your WordPress site. Check it out on GitHub.