Format your toots on Mastodon when using Share on Mastodon

I’ve been using Jan Boddez his Share on Mastodon plugin and really like how it works. Simple and clean. But the toots are not formatted very well. Poking through his code I found he added a filter for it so you can make your own format. Excellent.

Grab a copy of the plugin here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/share-on-mastodon/. It’s a super simple plugin to install and use.

Over the past few days I’ve been making test posts and settled on a format for toots like so: https://home.social/@arnandegans/109684410554812887.
Clean, simple, easy to read.

If you want this layout as well, add the following code to your themes functions.php file.

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// Reformat the toot format/template for Share to Mastodon
function ajdg_share_on_mastodon($status, $post) {
$formatted_status  = wp_strip_all_tags(html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID), ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5, get_bloginfo('charset'))) . "\n\n";
$formatted_status .= mb_substr(wp_strip_all_tags(html_entity_decode(get_the_excerpt($post->ID))), 0, 199, get_bloginfo('charset')) . "[…]\n";
$formatted_status .= esc_url_raw(get_permalink($post->ID)) . "\n\n";
 
$toot_tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);
if($toot_tags) {
foreach($toot_tags as $tag) {
$tags[] = "#" . preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9]/i", '', $tag->name);
}
$formatted_status .= implode(" ", $tags);
unset($tags, $toot_tags);
}
 
return $formatted_status;
}
add_filter( 'share_on_mastodon_status', 'ajdg_share_on_mastodon', 10, 2);

This basically does the same as the plugin does by default. But adds the except of the post (or a snippet if the excerpt doesn’t exist) and adds the tags. Tags with spaces do not work on Mastodon, so spaces are stripped out. And a few new lines are added for readability.

Enjoy!