Warfare Plugins

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social warfare 2.0 launches

Introducing Social Warfare 2.0: The Update You’ve Been Waiting For

by Dustin W. Stout

This is the biggest news we’ve shared since the inception of Social Warfare.

For the past year now we’ve been planning a major upgrade to our flagship social sharing plugin. This update was based on a combination of feedback and requests from our users as well as our own desire to push the plugin further than we originally thought possible.

And it’s time to unveil it to the world.

This update will not only bring a drastic upgrade to the admin user interface, add several new features but it will also mark a gigantic shift in our business model.

Are you ready?

Hello, beautiful

social warfare 2.0 dashboard

The first obvious upgrade is to the backend user interface. The admin settings page has gotten a complete overhaul— and even that seems like an understatement.

doctor-who-regeneration

This could be compared to when Doctor Who regenerates— it’s still the same plugin you love, but a lot has changed.

Navigating between admin tabs

We’ve tried to emphasize both simplicity and beautiful user interface. With as many options as Social Warfare has, things can get really complicated, really quickly.

So we first streamlined the navigation between tabs as well as greatly reduced the number of tabs needed to navigate between. We’ve gone from 14 admin tabs to now only 5.

new interface comparison

Additionally, the tab navigation is now at the top of the page, rather than the side, and will follow you down the page as you scroll for easy navigation no matter where you are on the page.

Display Tab

The very first option you’ll notice is one that we’re really proud of. It’s our new drag/drop interface for selecting your active share buttons.

Instead of a long list of on/off switches to determine which social networks you want to show, you now have a simple drag/drop interface. Simply drag the buttons you want to be active on your site into the Active section and drag any buttons you want to be inactive (or hidden) from your site into the Inactive section.

Pretty simple, eh?

Additionally, you can order the buttons in the Active section by drag/drop or choose to have the buttons dynamically order themselves based on the number of shares using the Button Ordering section.

order social warfare buttons

Other Tabs

You’ll enjoy this same level of simplification throughout the rest of the admin interface. And though we understand that big changes can often feel a bit cumbersome at first, once you’ve gone through all the settings, everything should feel just fine.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make sure every single option is organized in a way that should make sense and is easy to find.

Important: Since this update involved reworking the entire interface and rebuilding how many of the admin functions worked, you will need to go back through and check your settings to ensure everything is how it was previously.

New Features Added

Along with a revolutionized new user interface, we’ve added a handful of new features that we know you’ll love.

Popular Posts Widget (Updated)

popular posts widget options

We’ve leveled-up our Popular Posts widget to allow for a number of highly-requested features:

  • Post Thumbnails: Display your featured images
  • Visual Themes: 9 different themes to choose from along with the ability to select your own color
  • Time Frame: Decide what time frame you want to have your popular posts displayed from
  • Size Control: Easily set the image and text size for the widget

You can now display your most popular posts based on how many shares they’ve recieved, and display them with style.

Button Shortcode Options

For those who have been utilizing our shortcode to manually place sharing buttons, you will now have precise control over which buttons display with each instance of the shortcode.

If you have a page where you want different buttons to appear than what you’ve set by default, you can simply use our updated shortcode modifiers. For example:

[social_warfare buttons=“Google Plus, Pinterest, Twitter, Total"]

In that example, the shortcode would produce only the Google+, Pinterest, Twitter and Total Shares. The full list of modifiers are:

  • Facebook
  • Google Plus
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Stumble Upon
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • Whats App
  • Yummly
  • Buffer
  • Pocket
  • Hacker News
  • Flipboard
  • Email
  • Total

You can find further documentation on how this feature works in our Support article.

Pinterest Mentions

We know that when someone shares our post on social media, it’s nice to thank them. But it’s hard to thank them if you don’t know that they’ve shared it. That’s why @mention’s are so helpful— by adding your @username to a social share, you get notified of the share and can thank the person who shared it.

We’ve always had this ability built into the Tweet function, and have now added it to Pins when a visitor uses your Pin button. As long as you have filled out your Pinterest username in the Social Identity section of the plugin, you will be @mentioned every time someone Pins your posts/pages using the Social Warfare Pin button.

Flipboard Support

You want Flipboard? Well you’ve got it now!

HackerNews Support

Oh, you like HackerNews? We’ve got that too!

Small improvements that may go unnoticed

Throughout the plugin we’ve done a great deal of fine tuning that most people won’t ever see. But you can rest easier knowing that, yet again, we have made sure that Social Warfare is running better, faster, and stronger today than it was yesterday.

One More Thing

And this is probably the biggest announcement of all.

Social Warfare is now available to all, for free, with a slimmed down feature set. Social Warfare is first and foremost a best-in-class premium plugin. For those who simply want to give Social Warfare a feature-limited test-drive before purchasing, you can find us in the official WordPress.org repository.

social warfare available in wordpress repository

That’s right, for anyone who simply wants a free, lightning fast sharing plugin with very basic share functionality, Social Warfare can now be your first choice.

Whoa! A slimmed down version of Social Warfare is now available in the WordPress repository!Click To Tweet

For quite some time we’ve wanted to build a version of Social Warfare that was free to use for those who don’t need the premium features. And now finally we’ve been able to make that a reality.

This marks a new chapter for our team, and a new chapter for our business. As we continue to improve the premium features along with improving our support of the product, we can now begin to reach a critical mass of users which will give us more insight and feedback to continue making Social Warfare the best social sharing plugin on the market.

We still have much more coming down the pipeline that we weren’t able to include in today’s update. So stay tuned for even more improvements and features in the weeks and months to come.

Oh, and P.S.

We’re extending Social Warfare’s previous pricing for another 48-hours! So you still have two days to get your license(s) at the lowest price they will ever be before we increase them on Thursday.

Grap a Social Warfare license before the prices go up! This is a steal of a deal!Click To Tweet

Our gift to you for being with us for this momentous launch!

Note from Nick (The Developer): It seems that whenever you attempt something big, the journey is always filled with roadblocks. When we first launched version 2.0 this morning, there was a bit of a glitch. For some reason, the CSS file didn’t make it into the packaged plugin and the registration function was broken.

Fortunately, these issues were brought to our attention right away and we were able to spend the morning getting them fixed. So if after upgrading, the buttons are gone and only appear as text or if your registration isn’t working, simply update to version 2.0.1 and everything should be right.

This was a simple mistake that resulted in a big, ugly problem. It’s my fault and I’m really sorry to any of you who experienced a headache because of it.

Reader Interactions

Comments

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  1. Chris says

    This new update kills a clients VPS server when active. CPU goes to 100% till we deactivate it making it un-usable for them. Happened soon as we re-activated the account as that wasn’t transferred over after the update.

    • Carlos says

      Chris, the same issue with me. I am waiting since 14 July for the reply and nothing. Support for these types of cases is 0. 22 days for the developer to answer the ticket is ridiculous. the lead developer is an active military. And I have to wait your vacation for a response. This is absurd!

      • Nicholas Cardot says

        This CPU issue should be fixed. What happened was that we had one of the options creating a dropdown box of tags and categories that could be chosen from. We found one site that had 7,000 tags in which case it simply took forever to pull that many tags. We never counted on that. This is most likely the same thing that happened to you. We’ve since rebuilt that option to simply be a text box that doesn’t fetch all the tags from the database.

        Also, if you have an urgent issue, please stop by the GitHub and drop and issue there. That’s where I’ll personally see it and can track it easier. However, please document the heck out of it when you do place it in there. Try to describe exactly what’s happening, where I can see it, how I can replicate it. If you see any error codes, let me know what they say, etc.

        Here’s the link to the GitHub: https://github.com/warfare-plugins/social-warfare/issues

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi again Carlos! Unfortunately your ticket is of a much more technical nature than most of our team can troubleshoot. Our lead developer is out on Military orders so he may not be able to respond as quickly as he would like. We do not leave tickets open, however, and it will get solved as quickly as our team is able to diagnose what is happening on your install.

  3. Mario says

    Hello,
    after updating my bitly account is not working any longer. Previously I used branded short URLs by bitly, now the bitly account and the plugin are connected but the shortening is not working.
    Take a look at my site using Twitter share button:
    http://phastidio.net

      • Kathleen says

        Hi Dustin – Thanks for the link. I got registered, but I’m having two problems. One, there is no Click to Tweet icon in my editor and two, I have custom Pinterest images on a couple pages, but they’re not being used when I pin the images.
        I’m using a page builder called Beaver Builder. Is it possible your plugin isn’t compatible? Or, if I’m doing something wrong, I’ve gotten no response from your support folks since the 14th. Your help is very much appreciated.

  5. Jared says

    Just two feature requests for future updates:

    1. The ability to set the minimum share count display on a per-button basis rather than the total of everything. So if I had 100 Facebook likes and 4 tweets, and I set the minimum to 100, Facebook would show 100 and Twitter wouldn’t show anything (until it reached 100).

    2. Exactly what this plugin perfectly does right now with shares… but with followers. So like, something to put in a sidebar widget that would display how many followers a person has on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. I’ve been playing around with a few of them this week, and I reached a point where I thought “I just want the Social Warfare equivalent of this.” 😉

  6. Larry says

    Hello Dustin,
    I use Visual composer masonry grid to display my blog posts, and i’ll like SW share buttons to be displayed under each thumbnail on the grid.
    I saw this code on your support page, but i don’t know how to implement it into my theme.
    if(function_exists(‘social_warfare’)):
    social_warfare();
    endif; .
    I opened a ticket on this 3 days ago, but haven’t gotten any feedback from you guys yet.
    I just need you to direct me on the way to use it please.
    Thank You.

  7. rmznovali says

    Hello,

    I just check the language folder but not sure how to translate .mo files. Normally, There are 2 files .mo and .po. Can you help me please?

  8. Reese says

    Thanks for the 2.0 update. It is great! I especially love the thumbnails feature and the font size selector of the popular posts widget.

    I am wondering if you guys will be adding more options to the already robust widget. I know it’s a ton of work, but I am wondering if something like “choose category to display posts from” is on the table?

  10. Mario says

    Hello, upgraded at 2.0.2. Result: no share buttons, no widget, no active button in the plugin dashboard. Opened a ticket, thinking about moving a to a more reliable sharing plugin. Too bad to get this “huge” update.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi Mario! Thanks for your honest feedback. Most users have had a smooth transition and those who haven’t had a smooth transition have had our full attention working on fixes. If you’ve started a support ticket, our team will be on it right away and do everything in our power to get you up and running.

          • Dustin W. Stout says

            Hi Mario! It is safe to update. Just be sure when you do that you clear ALL caches including CDN and CloudFlare as well as your browser cache. And be sure that you have fully updated to 2.0.3.

          • Dustin W. Stout says

            If you haven’t already, Mario, please open a Support ticket as we’ve seen something similar on a handful of sites and we’re working on finding the cause.

          • Mario says

            Update:
            On Safari the buttons are there, on Chrome they’re not. On mobile they works.

          • Mario says

            I’ve fixed it: I’ve noticed that, launching a Chrome private session, I was able to see sharing icons. Therefore, in WP Rocket (my caching plugin), I checked on “Enable caching for known users”, and now I can see the icons. In case that could help other users with a similar problem.
            Thanks

  12. Jacob says

    The new 2.0.1 admin panel looks great, much improved UI.
    Massive rewrites are always tough to get without introducing or exposing some bugs, but I’ve only noticed 2 issues so far on my end, sent a support request. Great job guys.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Thanks so much Jacob! Your understanding is very much appreciated. It can be a bit overwhelming launching something new and having things go wrong, even if it’s only for a small percentage of users, we take it very seriously and treat it as if everyone had it go wrong.

      As all things in life though, we live and we learn and do better next time.

  13. Brennan says

    This update was quite buggy. It caused the buttons to disappear with v2.0.1 from the wordpress repo. It then prompted for an update to v2.0.2 and still didn’t work even after clearing all caches and the CDN. I uninstalled and reinstalled with the same result two times – no buttons. I finally uninstalled, then downloaded the .zip from the warefareplugins website. I installed it from the .zip and it was v2.0.1. I then went to update it, activate it on a sub-site, register it, and now it works again. Using wordpress multisite 4.5.3.

  14. Sonal says

    All the premium features are greyed out, I have an active license but am being told I don’t. My bitly isn’t connected, my social fields are blank, and the styles I had before the update are not being displayed. Even my on page edit capabilities are greyed out. I submitted a support ticket already. I logged into my account on warfareplugins.com and it says I have 0 of 0 active licenses. I can’t even roll back to a previous version. Very frustrating.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      So sorry about this Sonal! The registration issue is fully fixed in the 2.0.2 release. Have you seen it pop up in your WordPress dashboard? And if you are not seeing licenses available in your account, we definitely want to have you open up a support ticket so we can have our team dig in and see exactly what’s happening.

      • Sonal says

        Yes, I have even updated to 2.0.3. As I mentioned, I did submit a support ticket and the issue is still unresolved. Every premium edit is greyed out and all my previous settings are blank/non-functional. Nicolas has been in touch and he notified me he could not find my order number (Strange—as though I have been erased from your records, 0 of 0 active licenses shows for me.) I forwarded the order to him and am waiting to hear back. If I could only roll back to a previous version the wait wouldn’t be so bad. But … not to take away attention from the big problem here (of only having the slimmed down version functionality for my paid license), if you remember my previous tickets (my buttons disappeared—this was due to a script issue.) After that my twitter count stopped working suddenly after that same update. Well SW is still not counting tweets even when I purposely tweet. That tweet shows on my twitter page but the count is still zero on the page I tweeted from.

  15. Toki Castro-Tover says

    Hey hey!

    Yes I also deleted and installed from repository and nothing shows up plus it will unregister when I refresh to view changes. I did put in a support ticket also 🙁

    Hope this can be resolved soon!

    Toki

  16. Thomas says

    Any update to the problem of the top share area adding pin/tweet etc before text on Facebook etc? I know it was being looked at but loaded the new plugin and it doesn’t seem to fix this issue. The fix has been to only load buttons on the bottom for now.. thanks!

    PS I too couldn’t get the buttons to load. Tried everything but then went in and rearranged the share buttons and then clicked save it started working.

  17. Sergio says

    I’m not into being difficult, but after going through 3 updates in one day and still being unable to register the plugin I’m nearing the “refund please” point … specially since I see others have reported the same issue (and yes, I did email support a few hours ago).

  18. dannybrown says

    Hi guys, just updated to 2.0.2, and when trying to set total shares to display based on share counts (as opposed to manually) the share boxes disappear.

    Also, load time on server is bad – it causes 503 error. When I revert to older version, it’s fine, but 2.0.2 is causing some conflict. Is there a way to revert back to 1.4.8?

    Also, just tried to submit support ticket, and Submit button not working. :/

    Thanks,

    Danny.

  19. Wade Harman says

    Dun Dun Dun Dum DA Duuum, Dum DA Duuum…Darth Vader doesn’t have anything on you guys.

    Best plugin ever…I’ve looked all over creation for a plugin that met my needs like this one and when you united me with this it felt like I was in a meadow slow-mo running towards the love of my life.

    Nice to see you guys keep outdoing yourself in each update.

    Rock on.

    Dun Dun Dun Dum DA Duuum Dun DA Duuum

  20. Patrick Schriel says

    Are you sure the plugin is working correctly? The bottons are behaving strangly on my ipad as they start out normaal sized and then getting smaller and smaller. Before I install social wargaren this need to be fixed.

  22. Ahmad says

    Dustin, like the plugin and left my pther premium plugin to join Social Warfare. Still can not register through :(( hence unusable…. disappointed.

    Already opened a ticket and tweeted as well. Please look at this via your technical support on urgent basis. I can not use the plugin.

    I was thinking of writing a positive review but after this non-registration issue, I am in two minds. Please advise.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi Johnny! We did think we would be able to finish up that feature before releasing 2.0 but unfortunately we could not complete all the necessary oAuth integrations. That will be the next feature we add in our next update, though.

  27. nutsandbolts says

    Deleting SW completely, then installing the repo version of the plugin, fixed the display issues for me. I had to go back and make sure my registration info was still entered to keep all the features, but now all good (other than Bitly auth but I opened an issue in Github for that one).

  30. William says

    Yeah, sadly the buttons aren’t showing up and it’s just test piled vertically on top of each other.

    Have tried many different ways and have all the settings from before. I’ve had this plugin now since January and was looking great. Is there a way to rollback the update to the previous version until it gets fixed?

    Have already sent in a support ticket also, but since many people will look on here for help, it’s good that they also know there might be some issues to be aware of.

  31. Muhammad says

    Like what I’m hearing but not in application. This update is broken. I still can not register this plugin. With the last version it still gave you all the features. With this 2.0 you are limited. I wasn’t fully satisfied before. Returning as a customer again to try you guys new version and I’m not even getting what I paid for. This is fustrating. How long will it take this update to work?

      • Teela says

        Same thing happened to me and it made my site load time insanely long. Had to deactivate – wish I could go back to the previous version to have something instead of nothing now. Frustrated.

        • Dustin W. Stout says

          Hi Teela! Sorry about that– there was an error in the WordPress repository file that we fixed right after discovering it (my comment to William). That should be all fixed up now. Try deactivating, deleting and then reinstalling/activating from the repository.

          • Gareth Gudger says

            Same issue as Teela for me. Insanely long page load times. Deactivated and deleted. Reinstalled from repository. And flushed server caches. Same issue.

          • Dustin W. Stout says

            Thanks so much Gareth! Would love to worth through this with you via our Support system. We’ve got the whole team on deck troubleshooting and just brought in two more developers.

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