BM Shots – Automated Screenshots for Your Website

BM Shots is a plugin that makes use of WordPress api for automatically creating screenshots of your website.

This plugin was developed for use on WPVote.com. The development process and code has been written up here.

Download

Download BM Shots here.

Examples

You can see BM Shots being used:

• WPVote : The screenshots beside each article submission are generated using the BM Shots api.
• Art Direction in web design : The website screenshots showing the different site designs were created using the shortcode.

Usage

There are 2 ways to make use of BM Shots. 1, the shortcode, and 2, a direct function call. If you install the plugin then the most common usage method is likely to be the shortcode.

Shortcodes

[browsershot url="http://link-to-website" width="foo-value"]

Just stick this in your post and the shortcode will be output as an image of the website you requested.

PHP Function

Using the PHP function is just as easy. The method looks like this:

bm_mshot ($url, $width = 250);

And usage is nice and simple.

<?php
$url = 'http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/';
$width = 300;
echo bm_mshot ($url, $width);
?>

Notes

One thing to remember is that the image creation takes some time so will not display instantly. I have also noticed that some websites take longer than others, but they do show up eventually.