Flow-Flow — WordPress Social Stream Plugin

Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream Plugin is premium social media plugin to display social feeds in beautiful responsive grid with filters and live search. Make any combinations of social feeds with Flow-Flow! For example, you can have Facebook feed, Instagram feed and Twitter feed combined on one page. For its price, this plugin is a great alternative to web services that charge monthly payment for similar functionality. No monthly Subscription with Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream!

Smart caching with background server task allows to deliver content blazingly fast without long page loading. It’s especially crucial when many networks are pulled or you have big traffic. Jump to “How it works” section to check out details. Plugin is responsive and works well on mobile devices. It’s great to use this plugin for streaming your news, photos, reviews and any other content you can imagine! When only one network is not enough!

Plugin doesn’t expose your private details (like tokens, app IDs and app secrets) to browser and keeps it on server so we provide 100% security for any sensitive data. Plugin provides monitoring tools so you can see status of all your connected feeds and easily troubleshoot issues.

Available social feeds

• Twitter: home timeline, user feed, search * including hashtags, user lists, user favorites.
• Facebook: any public PAGE with public posts, public groups, public albums.
• Instagram: user photos, hashtag photos, liked photos. We support API changes after 1st June 2016.
• Google+: any public profile.
• SoundCloud: public playlists.
• LinkedIn: company updates and jobs (since recent API changes you must be admin of company page to stream it).
• Pinterest: public user or board.
• Foursquare: location tips, location photos.
• Vine: public user feed, user likes, search by tag.
• Flickr: public user photos, photos by tag.
• Dribbble: public posts of user, likes of user.
• WordPress: blog posts, comments, posts of specific categories, comments of specific post. (only own site, others blogs can be streamed using RSS feeds)
• YouTube: user, channels, search, public playlist.
• Tumblr: photo posts (will be more types in future).
• Vimeo: public videos of user, album, channel and like feed of user.
• RSS: any valid feed.
• Request your social network or feed!

* Twitter Search API restricts getting tweets older than week.

Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream features

Seamless API connection
Connect Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare with one click! Other networks are incoming.         Content moderation
Excluding posts by word, by username, by URL. Clean your grid from trolls and spam!
  Visual Composer element
Place your stream with ease if you’re using Visual Composer.

        Social sharing buttons
Drive the interaction and user involvement!   All popular Social Networks
And their number is growing (based on popular requests).
        Smart server caching
Grid loads almost instantly. No need to load data every time.   CSS3 transforms animation
Shows the best performance and speed.

        Cosy Admin Panel
Intuitive and clean interface with live preview.   Lightbox galleries
Fanstastic looking with attractive animations. Smart media preloading.         Well documented
Straightforward step by step setup guides.

  Responsive design
With swipes support for sliding on mobiles.

        Highly customizable
Change colors, width/margins, design templates etc.   Graphomaniac protection
Expanding/collapsing for cards with a lot of content.         Enjoyable interaction
Beautiful animations and hover effects.

  Video support
For YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram.

        “Show More” button
Load more items in stream.   Smart resource loading
Script and styles are loaded only when shortcode detected on page         Compact layout included
Special design for sidebar and narrow blocks.   Translation-ready
Use this tool for example to translate plugin. Then you can send translation files to us!         Approval system
You can preview posts before publish!

You can moderate your social feeds with this plugin excluding posts by URL, by username, by words. Broadcast your news, make portfolio, show client testimonials by your company’s tag etc. Plugin provides social sharing buttons to drive user involvement and interaction. We’re focusing on increasing the number of use cases for plugin.

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If you like Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream Plugin but it lacks important feature you need please request it!
Don’t leave silently with bad review if something doesn’t work. It can be your server issue or bad config. Please always ask support.
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How plugin works

You create streams in Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream admin and copy generated shortcodes. Then you put these shortcodes in any block on any page of your site. Plugin has special compact mode for narrow blocks like sidebar. When social stream is shown first time, it’s got cached (takes more time for initial caching but then it will show blazingly fast) and rest of visitors see this cache for cache lifetime. So for example if you have set 20 min cache and 10000 users visit your site within these 20 min, it’s only one time plugin will request API to pull data, for the rest of time users will see cached data almost instantly. Considering that server runs cache renew task in background it guarantees plugin’s amazing performance.

Design and styling options

Flow-Flow provides a great customization for design and stylings. Nice-looking professionally made layouts, different styles. Flow-Flow has many to choose from! Here’s a few examples you can try.

How multiple social feeds work

First of all you can create multiple socials streams (the only limit is your server capacity). The magic thing is that you then add as much social feeds from one or different social networks as you want. For example, you want to include in one stream 3 twitter accounts, 1 twitter hashtag, 2 google+ accounts and 5 facebook feeds. No problem! Here is a visual scheme:

Admin panel provides clear indication of important stuff and is very convenient. You can easily manage your social streams from one compact list.

Filter

Filter is optional feature of Flow-Flow. If you would like to use plugin with complex streams this feature could be handy.

Requirements

• Starting from 1.4 plugin requires PHP 5.3 and above on your server with mysqli extension for MySQL (InnoDB) (installation).
• You need to have jQuery version 1.7 and above.
• Some network APIs MAY require secure connection to send data so your server should have SSL certificate installed. In the most cases SSL is provided by hosting. We use private APIs because it’s more secure obviously, no one sees your secure data (tokens etc) on client side and these APIs provide more possibilities for streaming.
  Next networks MAY require secure connection if your hosting is not in trusted list: Twitter, Facebook, G+, Instagram. If you need SSL please check this article to consider free and lowcost options.
• Grid engine is pretty resourse heavy and using latest technologies so some devices (eg. low-end or old models) can struggle displaying grid especially when being combined with another heavy scripts on page.
• The more streams you have the more powerful server you need. Average server can handle 10 streams with 10 feeds in each no problem.

Changelog

Latest Version 2.10. Update via FTP is recommended. Check more details on what’s new in update

[2.10.2] [FIX] Widget page issue
[2.10.2] [FIX] Typo in code made admin page fail to load when code optimization is used on site
[2.10.1] [FIX] When adding/saving feeds admin UI is not updated
[2.10.1] [FIX] For migration usecase 
[2.10] [IMPROVEMENT] Reworked how streams and feeds work and connect
[2.10] [FEATURE] Enabling/disabling feeds
[2.10] [FEATURE] Reset cache for feed
[2.10] [IMPROVEMENT] Admin UI
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[2.9.4] [REMOVED] Instagram Popular feed which was deprecated in API
[2.9.4] [FIX] In some cases plugin didn't show error messages for Twitter feeds
[2.9.3] [IMPROVEMENT] Cache populating and performance
[2.9.3] [FIX] 'Show only image posts' setting worked incorrectly for Twitter feeds
[2.9.2] [TWEAK] Approved items will make it to live stream with Broadcasting add-on
[2.9.2] [REMOVED] Deprecated Home timeline for Instagram due to shutdown of this API 
[2.9.1] [TWEAK] WordPress posts image size for thumbnails
[2.9.1] [TWEAK] Cache building minor optimizations
[2.9.0] [ADDED] New Instagram app that will work from 1th July 2016 (you just need to re-authorize it in admin)
[2.9.0] [TWEAK] Facebook post images are not cropped to square 
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[2.8.0] [NEW] Extension for big screens released, check Extensions tab on admin page
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[2.7.1] [FIX] Activation that was broken in 2.7.0
[2.7.0] [FEATURE] Facebook images server cache for better performance
[2.7.0] [COMPAT] New extension compatibility
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[2.6.4] [FIX] Accident incompatibilty with our other plugin Superfly
[2.6.4] [TWEAK] Facebook videos API links expiration
[2.6.4] [TWEAK] Some issues with Twitter working because of SSL server config
[2.6.3] [FIX] Admin cloning in some cases didn't work
[2.6.2] [FIX] Compatibility with BackupDaddy and other custom Cron jobs users
[2.6.1] [FIX] On some servers WP formatting settings broke plugin output
[2.6.0] [FEATURE] Added Facebook authorization via our own app to get token more conveniently
[2.6.0] [TWEAK] Random order is random every time not being cached
[2.6.0] [TWEAK] Improvement for formatting compatibility with some WP settings
[2.6.0] [FIX] Slideshow issue for items loaded after Show More clicked
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[2.5.3] [FIX] For broken images in WordPress feeds
[2.5.2] [FIX] For broken unistallation that erases streams, please update versions 2.4-2.5 via FTP to not lose streams
[2.5.1- 2.5.2] Improved integration with advertising extension
[2.5.0] First extension for Flow-Flow released, check Extensions tab on admin page
[2.5.0] [Improvement] Instagram hashtags now are links in post body
[2.5.0] [Fix] For combination of settings of hide meta and disabled lightbox
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[2.4.1] [New] Setting for Youtube playlist order
[2.4.0] [New] Platform for future extensions added
[2.4.0] [Improvement] Better migration from earlier versions
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[2.3.2] [Improvement] API errors messaging for Instagram
[2.3.2] [Improvement] Fix for rare usecase with images in G+ feeds
[2.3.1] [Fix] Backbone.js dependency declared for admin
[2.3.1] [Fix] Admin notifications script wasn't included in production build
[2.3.0] [Updated] Google+ icon
[2.3.0] [New] Feedback admin tab 
[2.3.0] [New] Activation with purchase code admin tab
[2.3.0] [New] Extensions admin tab
[2.3.0] [New] Notification system for important announcements in admin
[2.3.0] [New] Collapsing/expanding sections in admin 
[2.3.0] [Updated] Admin alerts style
[2.3.0] [Fix] Minor admin fixes
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[2.2.2] [New] Additional authorization flow for Instagram via our own app
[2.2.1] [Fix] When error warning being displayed on front-end even if there is no error
[2.2.0] [New] Facebook album feed
[2.2.0] [New] Admin indication and displaying of errors for each feed
[2.2.0] [Setting] Choose if header links to post or open popup
[2.2.0] [Setting] Choose if header links to post or open popup
[2.2.0] [Improvement] Linkedin posts usecase to show thumbnail for shared articles
[2.2.0] [Setting] Specifying user role that are allowed to pre-moderate
[2.2.0] [Setting] Hiding meta (username, social network icons) and post texts
[2.1.6] Fix for error messaging for admins on front-end
[2.1.5] Fix for premoderation feature broken since 2.1.2
[2.1.4] Fix for previous versions 2.1.2-2.1.3
[2.1.4] Update for Linkedin attached post images
[BROKEN][2.1.3] Image thumbnails for Facebook posts with shared articles
[BROKEN][2.1.3] Fix for activation broken in previous version
[BROKEN][2.1.2] Compatibility with Social Stacks plugin
[2.1.1] Fix for SLIDER ON MOBILE setting that caused plugin to show 3 cards in grid on desktops when set to YES
[2.1.1] Fix for seach input background color when transparent background set for container and line is visible
[2.1.1] Admin various tweaks
[2.1.0] Visual Composer Flow-Flow element added
[2.0.3-4] Error messaging improved
[2.0.2] Fix for 2.0.1 error container appearing even if there is no error 
[2.0.1] Error messaging for admins added
[2.0.1] New Dribbble API added
[2.0.0] Fix for double quotes in content field eg. in Twitter search term
[2.0.0] Moving plugin version to 2.x branch after stabilizing 1.4.x branch
- 1.4.16: Update for new Vimeo albums API
- 1.4.15: Fallbacks for not having multibyte module enabled for server PHP (affecting Twitter)
- 1.4.14: Fix for cloning streams (this caused malfunctining like no updating for original and cloned streams) in 1.4.x versions
- 1.4.13: Youtube playlist posts order issue resolved 
- 1.4.13: Anonymous function call that can cause T_FUNCTION error removed in 
- 1.4.12: Multiple streams on page compact slider issue
- 1.4.11: WPML translatable
- 1.4.11: Changed images linking logic on mobiles
- 1.4.11: Improved migration from earlier versions 
- 1.4.10: CSS for long links breaking lightbox layout
- 1.4.10: Facebook API v. 2.4 
- 1.4.9: Fix for random order
- 1.4.9: Fix for "SafeMySQL Exception: Unknown MySQL server host" error
- 1.4.8: Displaying of installation errors info
- 1.4.7: Fix for Safari private mode usecase
- 1.4.6: Fix for instagram tags with åäö symbols and fix for Linkedin post link
- 1.4.5: Fix for twitter "null" text
- 1.4.4: Fix for broken Linkedin API, admin usecase with newly created feeds and snapshots
- 1.4.3: DB tweak and fix fo Instagram usecase with uppercase usernames
- 1.4.2: Fix for formatting in RSS and some texts ('n' symbols on new lines)
- 1.4.1: Fix for migration from earlier versions

Version 1.4

 
- Premoderation (approval) system added
- Improved server & browser performance
- Admin page is AJAXified (no page reloading for ever smoother user experience)

Version 1.3.0 – 1.3.17

- Update for Pinterest API for boards in 1.3.17
- Fix for Twitter search feeds and advanced terms using in 1.3.16
- Admin fix for colorpickers initialization when creating new stream in 1.3.15
- Improved error messaging  in 1.3.14
- Update for latest Vimeo embeds  in 1.3.13
- G+ video (Youtube) posts support  in 1.3.12
- SoundCloud integration in 1.3.11
- Cache system optimizations in 1.3.10
- Facebook "shared link" posts correctly attach links in 1.3.9
- Tweaks for Youtube videos in Facebook posts in 1.3.9
- Tweak for video thumbnail in FB posts in 1.3.9
- Fix for Instagram duplication when existing number of posts < 20 in 1.3.8
- Facebook posts inherit WP site language in 1.3.7
- Pictures are now shown for Facebook event posts in 1.3.7
- Feed of FB token owner posts is using current API version (previous doesn't work anymore) in 1.3.7
- Fix for Youtube search posts max limit in 1.3.6
- Fix for possible 'malformed' error for Instagram in 1.3.6
- Fix for possible case when streams don't update in 1.3.5
- Firefox lightbox animation fix in 1.3.4
- Tweets by language in 1.3.4
- LinkedIn integration added in 1.3.3
- Instagram class updated to be able to stream more than 33 posts in 1.3.2
- Flickr API updated in 1.3.1
- Support for YouTube v3 API in 1.3.0

Version 1.2.0 – 1.2.43

- FB sharer update for mobiles to sync with new FB API
- Tweaks for WP feeds (images in lightbox and timestamps)
- Additional filtering for support video in updated YouTube API 
- Filter for support video in updated YouTube API
- Option for show post title in WP comments feed
- New default sorting algorithm to show different networks proportionally by date
- Fix for HTTPS forcing when option is set to NO
- Setting to force HTTPS for image sources
- Facebook groups 
- Twitter favorites
- IPv4 support
- Custom post support for WP feeds
- Months are made translatable 
- Clicking title opens lightbox not original post
- More debug messages for admins
- WP posts stripping tags removed
- SSL checking disabled (can possible solve SSL issue if you have one)
- Adjustments for dynamic images height calculation
- Update for Instagram API (install it if your Instagram feeds don't show up anymore)
- Further improvements for RSS to cover more formats and usecases
- Additional filtering for Facebook feeds to remove meaningless posts or posts without message
- Errors info for admins
- Admin tweaks
- Lightbox tweak for landscape orientation images
- Optimizations for usecase when one has a lot of feeds in streams
- Fix for usecase when images can be doubled for loaded RSS cards if rich mode is used
- Fix for usecase when you use grid layout and slider mode for mobiles 
- Fix for usecase with PHP parser (if stream HTML is not at page at all)
- Fix for usecase with Twitter links and long IDs
- RSS feed tweaks
- Fix for Vimeo likes feed
- RSS feed tweaks
- YouTube search
- New Instagram feed: liked posts
- YouTube public playlists
- Grid engine optimizations
- Links wrapping fix
- Mobile tweaks
- Plugin's data snapshots to save/back up and load your data from specific moment of time
- Mobile UI tweaks
- Foursquare, Vine and Dribbble support
- Various improvements and fixes
- Twitter lists
- Wordpress category posts and comments for specific post
- Lightbox tweak for large content
- Sharing buttons and Reply/retweet/favorite buttons for Twitter added

Version 1.0.0 – 1.1.9

- Moderation for stream items added (by URL, by username, by words)
- Load More button added (loads items if available)
- Translation-ready
- Featured images for WP posts
- Support for videos uploaded to Facebook itself
- Fix for rare usecase when lightboxes are not visible
- Flickr social network support added
- Tumblr social network support added
- Vimeo social network support added
- Admin fixes
- Grid item width and margin settings added
- Admin optimizations for large number of streams
- Fixes for 1.1.0 for cloning/deleting streams (in 1.1.1)
- Plugin stores options when being deactivated/deleted via WP (in 1.1.1)
- Various tweaks and fixes (in 1.1.2-1.1.4)
- Lightbox gallery added
- YouTube channels and Instagram videos support
- Removed possible conflicts with another social plugins 

Please leave your feedback on comments page, we’re interested to improve the product with focus on clients’ satisfaction. If you have issues please send message via contact form we’ll try to update/fix as soon as possible.

Survey!

Developing of Flow-Flow Social Streams is based on user suggestions. If you lack some features or social networks/feeds please take a minute and answer three simple questions. You decide and affect the priority of developing. Many thanks!