PostCaster publishes WordPress posts to Bluesky and Mastodon when a post goes live. It supports both site-wide accounts and personal author accounts, with previews, test posts, and per-post overrides on the post edit screen.

This plugin is intended for editorial sites that want social posting to stay close to the WordPress publishing workflow.

Key capabilities:

Publish automatically when a post moves from unpublished to publish
Use site-wide accounts in PostCaster > Global socials
Let authors use their own accounts in PostCaster > My socials
Preview the exact text before publishing
Override the text per article
Choose featured-image behavior per network
Re-publish manually from the post edit screen when needed

Quick start:

Activate the plugin.
Enable PostCaster in PostCaster > Settings.
Choose which post types may be published automatically.
Configure one or more site-wide accounts in PostCaster > Global socials.
Send a test post for each configured network.
Publish a test article and confirm the result on the target network.

Supported networks:

Bluesky
Mastodon
Permissions and publishing model:
Editors and administrators can publish through configured global accounts.
Authors can publish through their own personal accounts when personal publishing is enabled for them.
A user who has access to both global and personal targets can choose which targets to use during manual publishing.
If Co-Authors Plus is active, linked co-authors are also recognized for personal publishing.

Templates and previews:

The default message template is based on post title and URL.
You can set a general template, network-specific templates, and post-specific overrides.
The post edit screen shows previews for the currently available publish targets.
If the final message is still too long for a network, PostCaster skips that target and stores an error on the article.

For template details and examples, see docs/templates.md in the plugin repository.

Troubleshooting highlights:

Always use the built-in test-post buttons after changing credentials.
If a network is enabled but not posting, first check credentials and article-level errors.
If encrypted credentials can no longer be read, re-save them in Global socials or My socials.
Publishing runs through Action Scheduler in the background; low-traffic sites still benefit from a real server cron job or scheduled task for reliable timing.

External services:

PostCaster connects to external social networks only after an administrator or user explicitly configures that network and saves the required credentials.

When configured, PostCaster may send:

text rendered from post fields and templates
featured image bytes and alt text
the configured account identifiers required by that network

Relevant service documentation and terms:

Bluesky developer docs: https://docs.bsky.app/
Bluesky terms: https://bsky.social/about/support/tos
Mastodon API docs: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/
Privacy note:

PostCaster does not send usage analytics or telemetry to the plugin author. Network requests are only made to the configured social networks for test posts and actual publishing.