How to Show Your Latest Pinterest Pins in WordPress Sidebar Widgets

Few days ago, we showed you how to add the Pinterest “Pin It” button in your WordPress blog. We are seeing more and more people joining Pinterest every day. Some of you might even want to show your latest pins in your sidebar. Well, in this article, we will show you an easy way to displaying your latest pinterest pins in your sidebar or any other dynamic widgets area.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Pinterest RSS Widget plugin. After installation, simply go to Appearance » Widgets. There will be a widget called Pinterest RSS Widget. Drag it in the appropriate widget area, and configure the settings.

You can customize the size of your thumbnails. You can also choose to display the titles below the images or not.

If you want to show the Pinterest Pins on a post or a page, then you can do that using the following shortcode:

[prw username="syedbalkhi" maxfeeds="10" divname="myList" printtext="0" target="newwindow" useenclosures="yes" thumbwidth="100" thumbheight="100" showfollow="medium"]

If you want to show the Pinterest Pins in your theme by hard coding it, you can also do that using this plugin. Simply add the following codes wherever you want to display the latest pins:

<?php get_pins_feed_list($username, $maxfeeds, $divname, $printtext, $target, $useenclosures, $thumbwidth, $thumbheight, $showfollow); ?>

The parameters are:

• username is the Pinterest username you wish to display Pins from (mandatory)
• maxfeeds is the maximum number of Pins to display (optional, default = 25)
• divname is a name suffix for the list class. “myList” will become “pins-feed-myList” (optional)
• printtext must be 1 if you want the first few words of the Pin description to be printed below the thumbnail (optional)
• target is “samewindow” or “newwindow”, depending on where you want links to open (optional, default = samewindow)
• useenclosures is “yes” or “no” (optional, default = yes). Use this if you don’t want to use the tag in the feed and force the script to find an image
• link in the feed item description.
• thumbwidth is a number that will set the width in pixels of the Pin’s thumbnail (optional, default = 150)
• thumbheight is a number that will set the height in pixels of the Pin’s thumbnail (optional, default = 150)
• showfollow is “large”, “medium”, “small”, “tiny” or “none” (optional, default = none). Use this if you want to show the “Follow Me On Pinterest” button below the thumbnails. Select the size that best fits the space allowed (“large” is 156×26, “medium” is 78×26, “small” is the square 61×61 logo, and “tiny” is the 16×16 logo.)

When installing this plugin, we ran into the issue of images not showing up. Thankfully, it is a known issue and the author has already covered it into the FAQ’s section of the plugin. If your images are not showing up, then below are the possible solutions:

• TimThumb requires the GD library, which is available on any host sever with PHP 4.3+ installed. Make sure your host has this installed (most do).
• Once installed and in-use, TimThumb will automatically create a /prw_tmp/ subfolder in your/ wp-content/uploads/ directory with proper write-permissions. If your host server doesn’t allow this by default, be sure to manually create the /prw_tmp/ subfolder in your/ wp-content/uploads/ directory and set the /prw_tmp/ folder permissions to 755. If this still doesn’t work, try setting the /cache/ folder permissions to 777.
• Known issue with timthumb.php on Hostgator: If your website is hosted on Hostgator, you may need to contact HostGator to request “mod_security whitelisting”. More info here: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/timthumb-basics

Download Pinterest RSS Widget plugin

P.S. Don’t forget to follow Syed on Pinterest