Today marks the release of Social Warfare version 1.2. We’re more excited about this release than any previous release to date!
Social Warfare 1.2 brings a lot of changes to the core functionality of the plugin. I’ve been working hard to rebuild huge chunks of plugin from the ground up with two incredibly important goals in mind:
- Optimization: Every day, I’m learning more about development, learning better, more efficient ways to write code. As such, I’ve been rebuilding chunks of the plugin in ways that have drastically reduced load time making the plugin faster and leaner than ever before.
- Scalability: Our users all have different goals and needs for their respective businesses. As such, we receive a lot of requests for new features like additional network share buttons, additional link shortening services, and on and on. Many of the changes that have been made in this update were done to make it easier than ever to continue adding new features. In fact, with developer hooks, it is now possible for third parties to create add-ons to our plugin.
We’ll get into that last bit later in this post, because it’s a big deal.
New, Optimized and Fixed with this update
Here’s a more detailed look what this update brings with it:
- New: Built in a multilingual functionality. Languages are currently limited so please feel free to send us translations that you would like to see added to the plugin. With the current architecture in place, adding a new language to the plugin only takes a matter of seconds.
- New: Added a developer hook to allow additional link shortening integrations to be created by third party developers.
- New: Added a developer hook to allow additional analytics parameters to be used with Social Warfare by third party developers.
- New: Added developer hooks for adding options to the Social Warfare settings page and also to fetch the options that the user has set.
- Optimized: Changed the way the user’s options selections are fetched drastically reducing database calls and load time.
- Optimized: Changed the way the buttons are sized paving the way for multilingual functionality.
- Optimized: Changed the way share counts are fetched. Previously each share count was fetched one at a time beginning the request as soon as the previous request was finished. Now all share requests fire off at the same time. This will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to fetch new share counts when the cache on the existing counts expires.
- Fixed: Changed the priority of the Social Warfare function hook to fix the double share button bug.
- Fixed: Adjusted some CSS to clean up the custom options display on the post editor.
- Fixed: Fixed some trailing commas in the Javascript file that may have interfered with minifying the Javascript.
- Fixed: Fixed an issue with the naming of our widget function to avoid conflicts with other plugins that were using the same naming pattern.
- Coming Soon: The developer hooks necessary to add additional social network share buttons are about 75% complete.
Developer Hooks: This is a big deal
Let’s talk a bit more about the concept of scalability: My goal is to create a very robust system of actions and filters that allow people to build their own add-ons, add their own custom recipes to their functions files, or easily be able to make adjustments when their theme requires it.
I’ve documented how our first few developer hooks work over in our developer documentation section. I want to create some really great documentation similar to how the WordPress codex is laid out so that it’s very, very easy for developers to create their own addons and modifications.
As I’m only just getting started into this journey of creating developer hooks, I want to hear from you. I’d love for you to take a look at what we have so far and to make some recommendations for what I could implement into the code to make it easily accessible for you as a developer to create something great.
Please hop into the comments below and let us know what you think about the direction we’re moving with the Social Warfare plugin.
I have been using Genesis Framework and Social Warfare Plugin. I would like to remove nc_socialPanel from Blog posts page.
How can I do it? Don’t want it to get done through CSS.
This question would be best answered by our support team. Have you reached out to them yet?
Could we have the option to place the floating bar on the right as well?
Adding that to our roadmap!
Great job guys! I’d love for the floating lower bar to work on mobile too. It is awesome to have the share bar always there on my PC and would love to see that on my phone too.
That’s on our list Stephanie! There were just too many conflicts when we tried it previously, but we will work it out!
I’ve just turned them back on for mobile so in the next update, you’ll see that happen. Thanks for the feedback on that!
Great job guys, keep up the great work! Loading fast is probably the #1 reason I switched to your plugin in the first place. So I always hope you keep that as top priority.
Yes, absolutely! This will always be a major priority for me. And even though it pretty fast now (actually much faster than the others), I’m still learning better ways to write code, and I find myself rewriting functions all the time to make this thing faster and faster and faster. Learning is fun. lol
Social warfare is a awesome plugin seamless responsive recommend everyone to use it.
Thanks, Walter! That’s great to hear!
Great work!
Thanks Mike!
I am not a developer so I don’t understand most of these changes but just want to say as a new user, I am loving Social Warfare and am looking forward to new features.
Awesome Gaye! Basically all this means is we’re going to be able to have developers create awesome new features that we don’t have time to make ourselves. 😀
Thanks, Gaye. Dustin is right. This whole update and post has a bit of dev geekery to it, but basically we’ve been pushing hard to accomplish two things:
1. Make it faster loading than ever before.
2. Make it easier for us (and third parties) to add new features quickly and efficiently in the future.