Social Feed Galleries for WordPress

What an imported feed does on your site

Connect an account once and the plugin asks the network for its newest posts, stores each one as a Social Item, and downloads its image into the Media Library. A feed is ordinary gallery content from then on, and every network here runs through the same importer and the same block, so an Instagram feed gallery and a Twitch one differ by two dropdowns.

The alternative is the network’s own embed widget. It keeps the live like counts and comment threads, and costs you an iframe you cannot restyle and a wall that goes blank when the API is down. An import gives those counts up and serves the images from your own uploads folder, where a post stays after the account deletes it.

What each network sends, and where it lands

Each account has a Max setting (Max Medias, Max Videos, Max Photos, Max Posts, Max Tweets) for how many of the newest posts to request, 30 by default and 200 at most. Facebook and Google Photos are not available. Per-network fields are in the social feeds documentation.

• Instagram needs a Business or Creator account. It brings photos, videos and Reels, a carousel arriving as its first image, with an optional profile header.
• YouTube reads a channel or a playlist, Vimeo a user, group, channel or album, Twitch the clips, streams or videos of a channel.
• Flickr is public photos only, from a user, gallery, group or album. Dribbble is limited to your own shots. X imports tweets with their photos, and RSS any feed’s items with their first image.
• Downloaded media lands in wp-content/uploads/visual-portfolio-pro/<network>/ and joins the Media Library under a Social filter. How social feeds work has the full storage table.
• Unsplash is the exception. Its photos are never stored as items or files. They load from Unsplash with the required attribution, refreshed every three hours.
• An item carries the image, title, description, date and author, whose name links to the profile. Comments count works for YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, views for YouTube and Flickr.
• Order by takes Date or Title, descending until you change it. Imported items have no categories, so the Filter element has nothing to list.

Getting the first feed onto a page

1. Open Visual Portfolio → Settings → Social Feeds, pick your network’s tab and click + Connect. Fill in the keys or finish the login popup, then press Save Changes. The import starts on save.
2. Add a Visual Portfolio block, set the content source to Social, then pick the network and the account. Until the import finishes the block reports “No items were found matching your selection.”
3. Check Visual Portfolio → Social Items for what arrived, and press Sync All Accounts if nothing has. To reuse the feed, save the block as a Saved Layout and place that layout wherever you need it.

The feeds are Pro, the layouts are free

You can build the gallery before you buy. Every layout and skin behind the demos above is in the free plugin, and only the Social content source needs a license. The full split is on the free vs Pro page, the license options on the pricing page.

• Free covers the Tiles, Masonry, Grid, Justified and Carousel layouts, the Classic, Fade, Fly and Emerge skins, AJAX filtering and sorting, and every pagination mode.
• Pro adds the Social content source, the Settings → Social Feeds tab, the Social Items and Social Profiles screens, and the sync that keeps them current.
• Pro contains the free plugin, so you install one of the two. A free copy at 3.8.1 or newer may stay active next to it.

Questions about running a feed

My feed stopped updating. What broke?

Usually WP-Cron. A full sync runs every two hours, and a five-minute job refreshes one account whose data is older than three hours. Both fire only when somebody visits the site, and the downloads need loopback requests, which Tools → Site Health reports when blocked. A real cron job every five minutes fixes it. The CRON page has the two lines.

Which servers does the plugin talk to?

The networks’ APIs during a sync, api.visualportfolio.com for license activation and update checks, and visualportfolio.com for the login popups that some networks use instead of keys. Credentials stay in your database and never reach the block editor, which receives account names only.

Can I hide one post without dropping the feed?

Trash the Social Item. It leaves the galleries and later syncs skip it. Delete it permanently and the next sync brings it back, unless you also apply the Exclude from Sync bulk action. Edits survive, since a sync never overwrites an existing item. Both controls are on the Social Items screen.