Make Google & WordPress Play Nice with Google+Blog

A few weeks ago Sarah showed you how to link up your Google + with WordPress using a service called ifttt. Today I’m going to take a look at how you can do it with a plugin called Google+Blog. The plugin was developed by Daniel Treadwell, who’s been doing all sorts of awesome stuff with Google+ since it launched.

You can grab the plugin from here – there’s both a free and premium version (your $10 gets the backlink removed).

Let’s take a look at how to set it up.

1.    Install the Plugin

The plugin isn’t from the WordPress repo so you’ll need to install it using FTP. No doubt you guys all know how to do that by now :)

2.    Google API Key

If you navigate to Settings > Google+Blog Options, you’ll see that you need to add an API key. To get that click the link to the Google API Console.

You’ll be taken to this page where you should click on the “Create Project” link.

Scroll to find the Google+ API key setting and switch this to “on”. (You will have to agree to Google’s Terms of Service).

Scroll back to the top of the screen and click on “API Access”

Look for Simple API access and copy the API key.

Paste the API Key into the Google+Blog WordPress settings.

3.    Google+ Profile ID

The next item you’ll need to insert is yout Google+ Profile ID. You’ll find this by visiting your Google+ Profile. It appears in your URL.

Copy your Profile ID and paste it into your Google+Blog WordPress Settings.

4.    Other Google Options

There are a number of other options to help you control content from Google:

• Post History: Choose how many posts to import (up to 200 – the dev recommends you lower this after your first import).
• Exclusion Category: if you don’t want your Google+ posts to appear on your front page, set up a category term and apply it here to your Google+ posts. They will still be available via the category feed for that term (no doubt you could also create some sort of fancy widget with that).
• Import Trashed : decide whether you want to import trashed posts or not
• Display Google+ Link: kind’ve self evident
• Display Reshares: show all the reshares of your post
• Import Tag: Use a hashtag to only import specific posts to your WordPress blog

5.    WordPress Settings

There are also a number of settings you can tweak to play around with things on the WordPress end.

• Status: choose whether your Google+ post should be automatically published, or whether you want it set to draft, pending review, etc
• Author: assign a specific author
• Categories: choose categories to assign your G+ posts to
• Tags: add tags to all your posts.

Click “Update and Import”

And here you go:

One of my many super-awesome posts from G+ imported into WordPress. As well as importing text the plugin also imports comments and images.

I can see this being a great way to post a lot of content onto G+ and then distribute that content to different WordPress blogs. So, I could import all of the posts with the hashtag #WordPress to a WordPress-related blog all my cat-related content to my cat blog using the #cat hashtag and all my chicken-related content to my chick blog using the #chicken hashtag…… you get the idea…

What do you think? You likey? Are there any other awesome things you’d like to be able to do with G+?