Screenshot Generator

Contributors: lassebunk Tags: screenshot, screendump, phantomjs, social, preview Requires at least: 4.0.0 Tested up to: 4.2.1 Stable tag: 0.1.7 License: GPLv2 or later License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Screenshot Generator takes screenshots of posts and pages when they are updated. These screenshots can be used for e.g. previews in social media.

Description

Screenshot Generator is a WordPress plugin that takes screenshots of posts for social media etc. when they are updated. It uses PhantomJS to do this.

Why? When developing Toptrust, I was tired of manually adding images of posts when sharing on social media. This was especially true for pages that had no featured/thumbnail images. I wanted screenshots to be taken automatically, and so Screenshot Generator was born.

Usage

When you update a post or page, a screenshot is automatically taken in the background. After a few seconds, the screenshot URL is saved to the post's meta key _scrgen_screenshot.

Screenshots on social media

An og:image and twitter:image:src is automatically added to the meta tags when viewing the post. These are only added if the post doesn't have a thumbnail, in which case the plugin expects the thumbnail to be added by you or another plugin. You can change this in the plugin settings page.

Retrieving screenshots manually

If you want to retrieve the screenshot manually, you can do so inside a post:

<img src="<?php echo scrgen_screenshot(); ?>" />

Installation

1. Download the plugin to wp-content/plugins.

2. Install PhantomJS.

   • Mac:

     $ brew install phantomjs

     Or if this fails, download from here.

   • Linux:

     $ apt-get install phantomjs fontconfig freetype*

3. Make sure the phantomjs binary is in your PHP's PATH.

   If you can't modify your PATH, you can set the PHANTOMJS constant to the binary's path and this will be used:

   define('PHANTOMJS', '/usr/local/bin/phantomjs');

4. Create a folder called wp-content/screenshots and grant write permissions.

5. Update a post.

Contributing

Contributions are appreciated and very welcome. You can contribute in the plugin's GitHub repository.

Credits

The screenshot functionality is adapted from Microweber's Screen code.

Screenshots

1. How the screenshot will look when shared in social media.
2. The settings page.