The Venango County Humane Society is a small no-kill shelter in northwestern Pennsylvania with room for fewer than sixty animals at a time. Most of the dogs and cats who come through find homes with families nearby, but every so often someone drives a long way to meet a pet they first saw online — which is the whole reason this post exists.
Every adoption starts the same way: someone, somewhere, sees a pet and stops scrolling. The more places those pets show up, the more chances they have to be seen.
So I built a small WordPress plugin that lets any WordPress site display adoptable pets from VCHS. If you run a website — a local business, another nonprofit, a vet clinic, a personal blog — you can drop a block onto a page and visitors will see real pets currently looking for homes. Click any of them and they’ll be sent straight to the shelter’s adoption page to start the process.
Here’s what it looks like in action. These pets are live right now:
Lily
Miss Lily is a sweet and quiet girl looking for a forever family to share her love with. She mostly keeps to…
Meet me →
Ruthie
Meet me →
Cabbage
Say hello to Cabbage! This free spirited young lady loves affection and is a great lap warmer. She can be quite playful…
Meet me →
Mocha
Meet Mocha, a curious and friendly female pup with a heart as big as her eyes! Mocha is a little unsure about…
Meet me →
Harriet
Harriet is a very affectionate older cat looking for a forever family. She doesn't always like being held for too long, but…
Meet me →
Wanda
Wanda (gray F) & Waverly (gray/white F) are a super sweet pair looking for their forever home! These two friendly females are…
Meet me →That’s not a screenshot. Those are actual animals at the shelter, fetched from vcpahumane.org as you loaded this page. When one of them finds a home, they’ll quietly disappear from the grid and someone new will take their place.
What this is
The plugin is called VCPA Humane Pet Companion and it ships two Gutenberg blocks that you can drop into any post or page. The shelter handles all the data — keeping pet listings up to date, syncing with their adoption software, writing the descriptions — and your site just displays whatever’s currently available. There’s nothing for you to maintain.
Both blocks pull live data, so you always show animals who are still looking. No stale listings, no manual updating, no risk of featuring a pet who’s already been adopted.
Block 1: Featured Pets
This is the block above. It’s meant for sidebars, homepages, footer sections — anywhere you want a small rotating selection of adoptable pets to share space with the rest of your site. You can choose how many pets to show, how many columns, and whether to randomize the order. You can also filter by animal type (dogs, cats) or by traits like “good with kids” or “special needs,” so a
cat-focused business can show only cats and a senior-pet advocate can highlight the older animals who are easiest to overlook.
It’s the browse surface. Visitors who like what they see click through to vcpahumane.org and continue from there.
Block 2: Pet Card
The second block is for when you want to feature one specific pet — maybe you’re writing a blog post about a fundraiser, or a particular animal has captured your attention, or you want to give a long-stay resident a moment of extra visibility. The Pet Card block embeds a single pet as a profile, with the shelter’s full writeup and a clear button to start the adoption process.
Joker
Meet Joker! This sweet boy is looking for a forever home to call his own. Joker has FeLV, or Feline Leukemia, and would need to be the only cat in the home or in a home with other FeLV+ cats. This is not contagious to humans or other species of animals. This does, however, mean his health would need to be monitored closely in cooperation with your veterinarian in order to keep on top of anything that may arise. He is very friendly, playful, and would be a wonderful companion for a family looking to open their home to a new member. If you think Joker is the right fit for your family, apply today! DOB: 8/9/2019
Here’s the part I’m most fond of: when a featured pet finds a home and is removed from the shelter’s listings, the block doesn’t break. It quietly transforms into a celebration card — “[Name] found a home!” — using the pet’s name and photo, which the block remembers from when you first picked them. You don’t have to update anything. A blog post you wrote a month ago about a pet who needed a home becomes, automatically, a blog post about a
pet who found one.
That feels like the right way to handle adoption: not as data getting deleted, but as good news.
How to install
Three steps, no code:
- Download the plugin from github.com/jwincek/vcpahumane-pet-companion (use Code → Download ZIP).
- Upload it to your WordPress site through Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
- Activate it. That’s it. The blocks will appear in the editor under
“VCPA Featured Pets” and “VCPA Pet Card.”
There’s nothing to configure. The plugin is preset to talk to vcpahumane.org right out of the box.
What it costs
Nothing. No fees, no API keys, no signup, no tracking. The plugin is GPL licensed and the source is public. The shelter is a small nonprofit and this is a small contribution to making their pets more findable.
If you have a website and even a corner of it that could host a featured pets block, please consider it. Every additional place a pet shows up is another chance for someone to stop scrolling.
For developers: the plugin is intentionally small and built without a
build step. If you’d like to read about how it’s put together — including the design decisions, the gotchas, and the things still left to do — I wrote a longer post about it: Building the pet companion plugin →.
If you’d like to help, the code is on GitHub and contributions of any
size are welcome.
Photos and pet data courtesy of the Venango County Humane Society.