5 Things About Social Warfare 3.2.0 You (Probably) Didn’t Know

In the latest update to Social Warfare, there were a lot of things packed in that may have gone unnoticed.

But I’m sure you’re super savvy and probably caught about 90% of them, didn’t you?

Well, just to be sure you didn’t miss a single thing, I’m going to go through every little thing that makes Social Warfare 3.2.0 special.

But first…

The Elephant in the Room

Over the years our team has learned a lot in producing updates for our flagship product. And we weren’t without our fair share of bumps in the road.

But we’re happy to report that this last round of updates seemed to have been the smoothest yet. We weren’t without incident, however, and we did have to work through some bugs.

For the most part, however, this update had the least amount of update issues and bugs of any previous version.

We believe the reason things went as smoothly as they did was because of our rockstar beta testers. Without them, we wouldn’t have nearly as much testing capability to account for different server configurations. So for that, we’re very thankful.

The Update Process

Over the last year or so our team has been working very hard to resolve some issues around updating through the WordPress dashboard.

While the large majority of users have been able to update Social Warfare – Pro through their WordPress dashboard without issue, there was still many who could not. These folks would then have to deactivate/delete their version of Social Warfare – Pro and then download the latest version from their Warfare Plugins Account page before installing and activating it.

If you have one site, this process isn’t super time consuming, but far from ideal. And if you have multiple sites, having to go through this for each site likely made you want to throw your laptop across the room.

We totally understand how annoying that was, and we wanted desperately to fix it for you.

With version 3.2.0, we believed we had solved it once and for all. However, after a few reports came in, we had to work through a few more kinks in the process to get it just right.

And finally, with version 3.2.2 we believe we solved it. Permanently.

Every update hereafter should come through without issue. Now, I say should because there’s always that small 1% chance that something unexpected happens and doesn’t work as intended.

But every test we’ve run so far has shown the update process is 100% fixed for every instance.

New Feature: Share Recovery URL

Have you ever written a blog post and years later thought to yourself, “Hmm, that permalink was terrible. I want to change it to a better one.”

Or maybe you have a blog post that is newer, more epic than a previous one about the same subject and you wanted to delete the old one and redirect it to the new one?

I’ve been there. In both cases.

But what happens to your social shares?

If your old post had 217 shares, and all you do is change the permalink, those shares are gone.

And although we’ve got a Share Recovery feature in Social Warfare – Pro that will help you when changing your domain name or moving to SSL, there was no way to save individual post shares when changing that single permalink.

Until now…

With Social Warfare – Pro version 3.2.0 we’ve added a new Share Recovery field that will allow you to add the old URL and add the share counts for it to the new URL.

Pretty great idea, eh? We thought so.

New Feature: Pinterest Descriptions for ALL the Images

You already know that we believe that Pinterest and SEO go hand-in-hand. That’s why we made Custom Pinterest Descriptions possible for your images from day one–so that you don’t have to use your alt tags in a way that might hurt your SEO.

Well, now we’re taking custom Pinterest descriptions to a whole new level.

Have you ever wanted to add multiple Pinterest images into a blog post, each with their own custom Pinterest description that would be automatically filled out when someone pinned it?

Of course you have!

So that’s why we’ve finally brought the ability to add a unique Pinterest description to every single image you upload to your WordPress Media Library.

This feature has actually been on our list for quite some time, so it’s exciting for us to finally release it into the wild.

On top of this ability, Social Warfare will now automatically insert a data-pin-description tag for every image in your blog post that is pinnable. If it doesn’t already have a custom Pinterest Description attached, your post default will be used.

So, yea… Pinterest description all the images!

New Feature: Pinterest Image Shortcode!

With a previous release, we gave you the ability to have Social Warfare automatically insert your Pinterest Image into the top or bottom of the post. For many people, this was a handy feature.

But some people wanted more than just top or bottom placement, they wanted to be able to put their Pinterest image at a strategic place within their blog post.

Say hello to the [pinterest_image] shortcode.

Simply add that shortcode anywhere in your blog post and the image you’ve uploaded as the Custom Pinterest Image will be automatically inserted and have the appropriate description you’ve written for it.

And if you have a specific Pinterest image from another post, or you want the shortcode to insert a different image and description, the shortcode also allows for an id parameter.

Simply find the id for your image, and add it to the shortcode to look like this: [pinterest_image id="1234"]

So where can you find the image ID?

Well, for that you’ll need to head over to your Media Library. Once there, make sure you’re in List view rather than Grid view.

Once in List view, hover your mouse over top of the title of the image you want to use and notice the permalink in the bottom-left of your screen.

That number immediately after the post= portion is what you’re looking for.

Now, we realize this might be a very technical thing to have to do, so in a future update, we’ll be releasing an easier way to do this–much like our current shortcode generator.

Bye-Bye NewShareCounts, Hello TwitCount!

First, Twitter decided to stop supporting share counts. Thankfully, though, services like NewShareCounts.com started popping up.

Since NewShareCounts was one of the first services available, we decided to integrate with it in order to allow Social Warfare users to continue getting their social proof from their Tweet buttons.

Sadly, NewShareCounts shut down. And although we already had an alternate service, OpenShareCounts, we wanted to add one more popular tweet count monitoring service to give users another option.

So with version 3.2.0, we’ve introduced TwitCount as an alternative source of counting how many times your articles have been tweeted.

Code Name: Buttercup

Did you know that Social Warfare 3.2.0 had a code name? Well, unless you’re one of our beta testers, probably not.

The code name for 3.2.0 was Buttercup.

Just to add a bit of fun to each update, they will all have a top-secret code name from here on out.

And don’t tell anyone, but version 3.3.0 (which is due out next week) will be called Count Rugen.

Anybody see where we’re going with this?

What to Expect from 3.3.0 – Count Rugen

For this next update, we’ve got a number of great things planned that we hope you’ll love:

• New Share Button: Mix (formerly StumbleUpon)
• Shortcodes will accept URLs instead of requiring a post_id
• Social Warfare and Social Warfare – Pro version independence
• Options to limit the amount of Bitly URLs created
• Update for the sidebar in the Settings page
• …and a few more goodies we’ll keep a secret for now

And if all goes to plan, this should be the smoothest update we’ve ever seen.