Foster Me: A WordPress Plugin to Help Shelter Animals in Need

photo credit: puck90 – cc

Everybody knows that animals need homes. There are far more pets available for adoption than there are people lining up to adopt them. Call your local animal shelter and they’ll probably tell you that they’re at or over capacity. That’s where foster homes can help to provide quality care for animals in the interim, until they find their forever homes.

Foster Me is a new WordPress plugin designed to help rescues and shelters make available pets more visible and easier to search. It was created by Stephanie Chow, a front-end developer and animal advocate located in Asheville, NC. Her Lending a Paw site features open source plugins and graphics for animal rescue organizations.

Foster Me makes it easy to list and manage animals in WordPress where they can be searched with advanced pet-specific filters, such as age, type, gender, temperament, special needs, etc.

When a visitor clicks on an available pet, the listing launches in a modal window. Individual pet listings display a full description, a slider with multiple photographs, and any applicable pet categories.

The plugin also makes it easy to list fostering information and to post your foster application. Chow has made every effort to make Foster Me a user-friendly plugin for rescues and shelters that may not have a WordPress expert on staff. The settings page allows you to easily customize the color and appearance of the header, pet options, pet grid and modal window.

Foster Me also includes an image widget for showcasing foster pets as well as a Recently Added widget to display new additions.

The plugin adds a whole suite of pet listing features that are general enough to be used in any kind of shelter or rescue website:

Filterable – filter by Type, Age, Size, Gender, Temperament, and Special Needs

Searchable – list is narrowed with every letter you type into search bar

Click On Any Pet – to view more information and photos

List Your Fostering Info – show how it works what to expect when you foster

Colors – are completely customizable to match your brand

Image Widget – place in sidebar to display a linkable, rotating image of foster pets

Recently Added Widget – place in sidebar to display your most recently added fosters

Check out a live demo of Foster Me to test out the pet searching and filtering capabilities.

Chow’s first plugin, Petfinder: Search and Rescue, is very similar to her latest release, except it requires the animals to be listed on Petfinder. If you already have your shelter or rescue pets listed on Petfinder, then this alternative will be a better option for automatically pulling in your existing listings.

Saving Animals with WordPress

The Foster Me plugin is an awesome open source tool that any shelter or rescue can use for free in combination with an existing WordPress site. When it comes to helping animals find their forever homes, open source software may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but Stephanie Chow is knocking it out of the park with her user-friendly tools designed to serve people who are rescuing creatures in need. Open source tools are more accessible to shelters and rescues that are spending every last dime to help animals find homes. If you have WordPress skills and are able to hook up a shelter with a website, then the Foster Me plugin will put you well on your way.