All services integrated with XPoster support some form of social media card; but these options are only available in Pro, and are disabled by default. This may seem strange, but practically speaking the majority of sites are likely to already have X-specific or OpenGraph meta tags already present. These are commonly provided by SEO and marketing plugins, or by many premium themes.
As such, making these options available in the free plugin is mostly pointless. However, not making them available at all would be very incomplete; and there are some specialized cases that need extra support.
Uploading vs. Cards
If you’re primarily sharing images, you probably want to upload the image to your social media post. If you’re primarily sharing links, you’ll most likely want cards.
Enable Mastodon/Bluesky Open Graph Cards
This is a standard format for social media posts, supported by most services. The implementation of card support on Bluesky is a bit unconventional. Rather than being pulled from your site at the time the status update is rendered, they need to be provided as part of the status update by the client. This has a couple of ramifications; the main one being that images need to be uploaded to Bluesky in order to display a card. This is not yet implemented in XPoster Pro.
Enable X.com Preview Cards
This enables the custom X meta tags, only supported by X.
Default Preview Card Type
X.com supports several different types of card views: summary, summary_large_image, and player. Summary is a small image with a text description; the summary_large_image is a large image; player is a custom video or audio card.
You should choose a type of card default that matches the content you generally share.
When X cards are enabled, you can choose which type to use for a post from the post metabox:
Auto-enable photo card
You can have the type of card switch between ‘summary’ and ‘summary_large_image’ based on the amount of content. Set a number of characters that sets the parameter for you: e.g., any post that’s less than 150 characters should be focused on the photo, not the text.
Enable Player Cards
Player cards require your set to be running on SSL (e.g., with an https:// protocol). This is pretty much the standard today, and if you are not, you should get that updated!
Player cards are complicated, as they require you to provide the video and the player. XPoster provides a custom player that will be opened in the player card when you use this.
Before you can use player cards, you will need to ensure that all assets are loaded over SSL, and you will need to validate the card with X.com.
In the XPoster Pro metabox, if you choose a Player card, you can then add a video, captions file, and set the video aspect ratio for your player. Videos can be either posted from YouTube or Vimeo, or can be uploaded to your server. (Be warned: if you are hosting a video shared on X.com, there is a possibility it will use a very large quantity of bandwidth.)
Upload images
If you wish to upload images to your services, enable this option. In most services, if you upload an image, it will be shown instead of your preview cards.
When uploading images, you’ll have an additional option in the metabox to select your desired image to share on social media:
This image is only used to post to social media services, and is not used in cards or anywhere on your site.
If you select an image here, it will be used to upload an image to your preferred service. If you do not, then the featured image will be pulled from the post, if it has one. If it doesn’t have a featured image, then the first image attached to the post will be fetched.
You can disable image uploading on a per-post basis by choosing “No upload” when configuring the share.
Be aware that each service has different requirements for images, both in the image formats supported and the maximum size of an uploaded image.
As of December 2024, X.com allows 5 MB; Mastodon allows up to 16 MB; but Bluesky only allows 1 MB.