Warfare Plugins

Dominate the world's social networks

social warfare version 2.2

Important Annoucement: Social Warfare 2.2 Release

by Dustin W. Stout

We’ve got some great news about the future of our flagship product, Social Warfare and how your website will reap the benefits.

tl;dr – Social Warfare 2.2 (and all following versions) will now be a standalone free plugin and all the premium features you love will come in the form of a separate “Pro” add-on, which you can download here (only after you update to 2.2). You may also access it at any time from your Account page. But please, read the full details below (they’re important).

While continually adding to the powerful features that drive results, we always want be sure to stick to our core values of creating the lightest weight and most powerful sharing plugin for our users.

In order to do this, as well as fall inline with WordPress’ strict plugin guidelines (which dictate that no plugin can have “locked” or “gated” features) we’ve decided to finally open up the door to plugin add-ons. This will enable us, as well as third-party developers, to greatly extend the functionality of Social Warfare moving forward.

You’ve likely seen this same thing done with other popular plugins such as:

  • WooCommerce
  • Ninja Forms
  • Easy Digital Downloads

What this allows for is a free and super lean core plugin (Social Warfare) and the ability to “add-on” extra features in an à la carte manner. To introduce this concept the first add-on is, naturally, the same set of features that you’ve been utilizing with your premium license. We’re calling it Social Warfare – Pro.

For current users, nothing changes regarding your license subscription. Simply update to Social Warfare 2.2.0 and then download the Social Warfare – Pro add-on, then install and activate it in your WordPress dashboard. Here’s a quick video showing you just how easy we’ve made this process:

As you can see in the video above, when you update to version 2.2.0 inside of WordPress you will get an admin notice that tells you to download, install and activate the Social Warfare – Pro add-on. Clicking on the download link in that notice will begin the plugin download immediately. Then all you need to do is go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin and upload the social-warfare-pro.zip that was automatically downloaded for you.

Important: Please make sure you update to Social Warfare 2.2.0 before activating the Social Warfare – Pro add-on.

Once you activate Social Warfare – Pro, all your premium features, settings and configurations will return exactly the way you had them before.

And that’s it!

As is good practice for any update, please clear all caches, CDN (including CloudFlare if you use it) and even your browser caches just to be sure the most current files are being shown for your website visitors.

Even More Add-ons Coming Soon!

In addition to Social Warfare – Pro, we have a handful of new add-ons we’re working on and hope to introduce them very soon. Here’s a quick look:

  • Social Follow
  • Shortcode Expansion
  • Social Analytics
  • AffiliateWP Sharing
  • Advanced Button Display
  • Pop-ups and Fly-ins

In addition to our own home-grown add-ons, we’re already in talks with third-party developers who have ideas for integrations with other apps and services. This is going to be a very exciting chapter!

The 2.2.0 update will also include dozens of performance enhancements, bug fixes and overall improvements to make Social Warfare better, faster and stronger than ever before.

If you have any questions or run into any trouble upgrading, please login to your Account page and send our team a message. We’ll have all hands on deck ready to help make this transition as smooth as possible.

Reader Interactions

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  2. Trevor says

    Really like the plugin. Hoping more updates coming. We really want a plus button to allow users to view more options. I feel inclined to load up the share bar because there is no “plus” or “…” to let them expand to see more options like many other share plugins. I also really want to see SMS and Facebook messenger added as options. People are sharing at chat apps now. What’s app is one of them but those other two are big. I can’t tell you how many times I text my friends an article.

    Finally, if we could rearrange or hide buttons on desktop vs mobile. That’s huge. Then we could lead with Facebook messenger and What’s app on our mobile, or hide some options on desktop. I’ve started shopping around for a new plugin because these are crucial features.

    P.S. An analytics dashboard would go a long way. I can’t make sense of the modules on Google Analytics.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Thanks Trevor! We’ll definitely take your ideas into consideration. Currently, the data and research overwhelmingly shows that when you give less sharing options you actually get more shares (see: The Paradox of Choice article we did proving this). So if our goal is to give people the most effective social sharing solution (which it is) and “effective” means that it produces more shares and more traffic back to your site, then we’re probably going to avoid a plus button.

      Desktop vs Mobile contextual sharing options are definitely something we’ve been interested in for a while.

  3. Marc says

    Hi Dustin, I just bought the pro version and it recovered the social counts great when I switched from http to https. Few things I would love to see happen.
    1. If you add few social share tabs, the rest is not accessible to share on other networks. Are you planing on implementing the + pop up with hidden social share if anyone wants to share somewhere else than what it set by the site?
    2. When using the legacy cache, the Pinterest pin won’t show up when hover over images.
    3. When you click on Pinterest share, it only can share one default image, Can you share all the images on the post and not just simply one?
    I am simply discovering and I was using ultimate social deux before and this plugin seems very nice and sleek. Would love to get some feedback on my questions. Thanks

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi again Marc! I’ll answer your questions as best as I can below. For future reference, just use your Account page for questions and support.

      1. No, we do not have any such option planned. The reason is because we know based on psychology and data that having that option will actually result in LESS shares for your site.

      2. This is a known issue our development team is working on.

      3. If you want people to pin a specific image (because you know it will have the best results on Pinterest) then you can upload that one image to the Pinterest Image spot in the Social Warfare Custom Options. If you don’t want people to have that specific pin (and a pre-written description) then just don’t upload an image into that spot. This feature is meant for those who want to get the highest traffic return from people sharing their Pins that they’ve created specifically for an article.

  4. Ravi Chahar says

    Hey Dustin,

    I have used it at one of my websites and it was working great until the last update.

    It was lacking in the visibility of the thumbnail. I guess, now it’s fixed.
    The plugin is amazing and I want to use to again.

    Thanks for letting me know about the update.
    I will try it again.

    ~Ravi

  5. B says

    Hi I didn’t see anything about compatibility w/ WP 4.7 on the plugin info page… is it OK to update to WP 4.7 if we are running the latest version of Social Warfare 2.2?

  6. Johnny says

    Noob question:

    I want the fastest load possible. Will Social Warefare (with only minimal features chosen + share counts) be faster than if I manually put up the share box codes for FB/twitter?

  10. Libby says

    I am excited to see the new developments as time goes on, well done.

    I have been going through all my old posts and adding the Pinterest, social media images and descriptions into the social warfare boxes. Will these remain when I update and install the new plugins? I’d hate to lose all my hours of work and start again.

  11. Wendy Holloway says

    Do you have a bullet point list of the advantages of the pro add On? I’m new to social warfare. Also, I have a primary site and a blog. Would I need to buy pro twice?
    Pinterest is fundamental for my business. Will Pinterest issues (as per everyone’s above comments) be resolved soon?
    Thanks!
    Wendy

  12. Aletheia says

    Good to see where the new direction is taking you.

    I saw the update to the version 2.2 and decided to go ahead as I saw a mention regarding the order in which the hover button images are loaded

    I thought this might fix the issue with WP-Rocket’s lazy load image and the Pinterest hover Save button which seem to be incompatible still, as the base64 url is loading when the Save button is pressed.

    When can we expect a fix for this plugin conflict?

    Thank you.

    Mateo

  13. Sandi G says

    I have both installed and all of the share buttons work except Pinterest. I double checked my settings and everything is correct. The floating pin button on my photos works, but the Pinterest button in the row at the top and bottom of the post will not pull the pin.

  14. Danny Brown says

    Nice job, guys, and looking forward to seeing where you go with Extensions.

    Two I’d really love to see implemented are Gated Content Sharing (unlock an ebook or similar if you share a post) and Highlight And Share (much like Medium does, highlight a piece of text and sharing options appear).

    Anyhoo, that’s my wish list. Congrats on the new path!

  15. Owen Marcus says

    Hi,
    I just tried a couple of times and got:
    Unpacking the package…

    Installing the plugin…

    Destination folder already exists. /nas/content/live/owenmarcus/wp-content/plugins/social-warfare/

    Plugin install failed.

    Return to Plugin Installer

    • Nicholas Cardot says

      That means that you’re trying to install a plugin that’s already installed. It looks like you’re trying to install the Social Warfare core plugin when it’s already installed. You’ll want to update that core plugin (Social Warfare) to version 2.2.0, and then install the Social Warfare – Pro addon and have both running. Does that help?

  17. Marisa says

    I cannot upload the pro zip file! It just isn’t in a zip file — I’ve downloaded it several times and WordPress just won’t upload it. Now what do I do??

    • Nicholas Cardot says

      Some will be free and some will be paid. This will depend on the value being provided. For example, one addon is going to make the buttons use affiliate links for folks who use AffiliateWP and have affiliates who promote their content to make sales. In which case, if you tell all of your affiliates that they can share any post or page on your site using the on-page social sharing buttons (Social Warfare) that will likely exponentially increase social shares and sales because your affiliates are literally incentivized to share your content. So something like that will be a paid a la carte addon. Some others will likely be free.

  20. PJ Germain says

    LOL! I just asked support about this! Awesome!

    So, I now have both installed, the original and the Pro and was happily informed that this will not slow down page load speeds because it’s loading the same number of assets on the front end. Basically, the two plugins contain the same code as one.

  21. John Montgomery says

    I wish there was a way to a have a standard plugin and a pro plugin that was standalone. It’s becoming rapidly cumbersome to have two plugins for each plugin with “pro” features (understanding you guys are not alone in dealing with guidelines).

    Still waiting on Twitter images — hope that comes out soon!

    • Nicholas Cardot says

      As the developer, I actually agree with you. The number one reason why we did this was to be in compliance with WordPress guidelines. But it was a good step also, because it is opening the door to a whole series of add-ons that we’re working on that can be added in that a la carte method that we mentioned in the post.

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Yea, in order to keep things lean, the add-on route seems the best way to do it. It’s also more practical from a development. From a performance standpoint, the impact of having one plugin that does everything or separating it into two plugins is negligible (if anything at all).

  22. Derek Price says

    I had one issue but support was able to find the cause. I needed to clear my browser cache. I emptied all cache on the blog but it was the browser cache that caused 1 issue.

    I use maxcdn, cometcache plugin and I advise everyone to delete/clear there cache if they are using these 2 plus there browser cache before contacting support.

    Can’t wait to get the new add-ons.

    • Nicholas Cardot says

      Derek,

      Believe it or not, that’s the most common solution that we find to most issues.

      When we update the plugin, we often update the CSS and JS files. These files are being cached by these caching plugins which will often cause it to be outputting the CSS and JS from the previous version of the plugin while the HTML being output is from the current version.

      So just like you mentioned, we always advice everyone to clear caches after updating plugins or themes.

  23. chrys says

    Hi!

    So if I get it right, in the plugin dashboard we have to let both the social warfare plugin + the social warefare Pro? Is that correct?
    Or is the Social warefare Pro replacing the normal social warfare plugin?

    Thanks!

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi Chrys! You will need to first install Social Warfare, which remains in the official WordPress plugin repository. Then install the Social Warfare – Pro add-on as a second plugin that adds all the premium features. Does that make sense?

  25. Ritchie says

    Hi Dustin,

    I just updated and the plugin works perfectly 🙂

    Not yet sure though if I’m happy about the new add-on policy… I’m curious about the pricing.

    In other notes, I’ve tried and tested a lot of social “autoposter” plugins (pushing new postings to fb / twitter / linkedin etc.) and ideally begin able to auto re-schedule old postings…). None of these work flawlessly – such an “extension” would be awesome.

      • Paul says

        Just to put my two cents in here – Im in the same boat as @Ritchie – Haven’t found an auto-reposter that works well – Next Scripts is the closest I’ve come, but I’ve been waiting for over a year for a ‘new release’ that was going to fix a lot of problems with it – If Social Warfare had this functionality – it would be amazing. Go for it Dustin & Team!

        • Nicholas Cardot says

          I plan on creating one, but let me explain one of the major features that will separate ours from the others. Most just post the title and a link to the post or possibly a title, excerpt, and link. They’re all auto-generated. Our plan is to only do that as a last resort. Instead, we want to use the custom social media images, descriptions, etc., that you’ve crafted so their optimized for whatever platform that it’s getting posted to. Additionally, for Twitter, when sharing a post, we want to scan the post for in-article Click-to-Tweets and share those out as well. So it will be like clicking on one of your click-to-tweets, except that it’s automatically done for you in the background at scheduled intervals.

          Does that make sense? Does anyone else have any more ideas that might make this concept even better?

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