Jetpack 2.0, Packed With Magic

Last night, I preemptively tweeted about the upcoming release of Jetpack 2.0:

Today we actually released version 2.0 of Jetpack and it’s loaded with awesomeness. If you run (and host) your own WordPress-based site, you want it. You can read the official announcement post, but here’s a quick summary of brand new stuff:

  • Publicize: Auto-post your new posts out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Yahoo!
  • Post By Email: Send an email to a special address and the contents (including attachments) will be auto-posted to your blog.
  • Infinite Scroll: New tool for theme developers (or for you, if you’re using a Twenty Ten/Eleven/Twelve-based theme) that allows you to just automatically load new posts as you scroll further down the page.
  • Photon: Killer new image-manipulation service that combines resizing and filters with a powerful CDN.

I wanted to provide a really quick walk through of why I think this is becoming super interesting and powerful. Here’s what this version of Jetpack enables:

  • Install Jetpack on a self-hosted WordPress blog.
  • Activate the Post By Email, Publicize and Subscriptions modules. Connect to Twitter/Facebook/etc.
  • Send an email to your custom Post By Email address.

Here’s what happens behind the scenes if you’re making full use of Jetpack:

  1. The email address you sent to is handled by the Jetpack Server, which lives on the WordPress.com cloud (over a thousand servers, multiple datacenters, load balancing etc. Bulletproof).
  2. The email is parsed and broken down into parts. Oh, you included an image. Neato.
  3. Jetpack Server uses the JSON API to talk to your Jetpack-powered, self-hosted blog.
  4. A new post is created on your blog, and the image that you emailed is uploaded directly into your media library and attached to that post.
  5. When the post is published, Photon kicks in and makes sure to optimize the image to the size of your theme.
  6. Your image is also immediately cached on our CDN to speed up delivery and offload bandwidth from your server
  7. As the post is published, Jetpack notices and synchronizes the content over to the Jetpack Server for processing.
  8. Jetpack Server notices that you have some email subscribers, and that you have Publicize enabled
  9. Emails are sent out to all of your subscribers, and a message is pushed out to Twitter and Facebook because you chose to connect to them
  10. Facebook makes a request back to your site and reads the Open Graph tags that Publicize embedded in your page, telling Facebook which image and text to use to beautifully present your details to your friends.
  11. People visit your site, triggering a statistics collection, powered by Jetpack Stats. You get to see who’s checking you out, where they’re coming from (website and part of the world)
  12. Your images are served, automatically at the best possible size for your theme, from a network of servers around the world.
  13. One of those people posts a comment on your new post.
  14. You get a push notification on your iOS device, care of the Mobile Push Notifications module.

All of that happened. You sent a single email. I think that’s pretty amazing. If you don’t, well…

http://vimeo.com/14975413

Go download Jetpack 2.0 from the plugin repository, hit us up for some help, have some fun.