Storify, a service that launched in 2010 and opened to the public in 2013 has announced that it is shutting down version one of its service on May 16th, 2018. Concurrently, its WordPress plugin that is actively installed on more than 2,000 sites has been discontinued.
Storify enabled journalists and others to build stories and timelines similar to Twitter and other social networks. The service was acquired by Livefyre in 2013 and became part of Adobe when it acquired Livefyre in 2016.
Storify has disabled new accounts from being created and will delete stories and accounts on May 16th, 2018. Existing users who want to move to Storify 2, a paid feature of Livefyre, will need to purchase a license. The service has published a FAQ that includes directions on how to export content.
New Plugin Opportunity
According to some users, the export process is cumbersome, providing an excellent opportunity for a prospecting developer to create a WordPress plugin that makes the process easier. A search of the WordPress plugin directory for Storify Export produces zero results.
A fantastic #WordPress dev opportunity: @Storify just announced its "End of Life" for May 2018. The export is kinda lame. If I could import a story from Storify into a WordPress Post/Page that would be fabulous! I have a few stories that I wouldn't want to lose. #biz
— Birgit Pauli-Haack – next #WCEU (@bph) December 12, 2017
If you know of any methods or plugins that eases the process of exporting content from Storify and importing it to WordPress, please share them in the comments. Also feel free to let us know if you create a plugin that performs this task.
Cumbersome is one way to put it.
1. You have to export each story individually.. Fine if you only have a few, but if you have a lot of them? This could take a long time.
2. Images are exported as links to Storify’s mirror of the image, rather than linking to the original, which means that unless you go through and fix all of the links, the exported images are still going to disappear after Storify shuts down.
I’ve only got one story to export, and I’m seriously considering just manually replacing it with the individual Twitter embeds instead of using the exporter.