Twitter Cards, Share Count Recovery and Advanced Shortcodes

You didn’t think that Monday’s major 1.2 update was going to be all that we had cooking did you?

Nah, we had a few more things in the works that just took a bit longer to push out. And these are some pretty big feature adds as well.

Twitter Cards

Social Warfare 1.2: Developer Hooks, Major Optimizations, and Bug Fixes http://t.co/RUQvWCMSlF

— Warfare Plugins (@warfareplugins) August 14, 2015

The first, and probably most comprehensive update is Twitter card support and optimization. For those not familiar with Twitter cards, take a look at Twitter’s documentation.

We wanted to do more than just activate them, we wanted to include a few intelligent options as well:

• Allow for large image summary cards
• If large image is not present, they revert to regular summary cards
• Added ability for authors to include their Twitter username in the WordPress user profile which will be added instead of the default Twitter handle in the Social Warfare Display Settings
• Ensure that everything plays nice with the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin

So how do you create the Twitter cards for your posts? Great news— you don’t have to do anything different than you’ve already been doing. When you fill out the Social Media Image, Social Media Title and Social Media Description that information will be used to generate the Twitter card.

Just be sure you have activated Twitter cards in your Display Settings. If you turn Twitter cards off and use Yoast’s, it won’t pull from our custom fields. It will just pull the default title, excerpt, and post thumbnail.

So it’s really completely up to whatever works for you. But if you’ve been taking the time to fill those fields out, then I would think that you would want to use those fields for your Twitter card also instead of the default data.

In a nutshell, turning ours on extends those fields from applying only to Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn and makes them also generate the Twitter Card.

Share Recovery System

This is for anyone who has had to go through the pain and toil of changing up their permalink structures and thereby lost all of their social share counts. This can happen when you switch between one of WordPress’ built in permalink structures or if you’ve recently changed over from HTTP to HTTPS.

If you have found yourself in this situation, this is great news!

You can now navigate to the Recover Shares tab in your Social Warfare Settings page and activate the Share Count Recovery tool. Simply select your previous URL format and your previous URL protocol (or just leave unchanged if you haven’t changed protocol) and Save Changes.

Hooray— all your social shares will be fully accounted for!

Shortcode Upgrade for Redirecting Shares

Have you ever wanted to be able to place your share buttons on something like a Thank You page but you don’t want people sharing the Thank You page, you want them to share the Subscribe page (or whatever it was to lead them to that page)? I know I have!

Well we’ve now added the ability to use the shortcode with the addition of a post_id parameter to display share buttons for any post or page on your site. This is how it should look:

[social_warfare post_id=“XXXX”]

Simply change the XXXX with the id of your post or page. To find this number find that post or page from your list and hover over the title. The ID number is right after the “post=“ in the permalink.

Eventually we will have a much easier way of creating these shortcodes.

Mobile Floating Buttons are Back!

We’ve reintroduced the mobile floating buttons after removing them for a while. There were a lot of issues with them before and hopefully most of those issues have been squashed.

Let us know if you see anything strange happening with them!

A Note on Third Party Developers

As we noted in our last update about opening up our plugin to third party developers— we’re working very hard to create a well documented API to allow for developers to create add-ons quickly and easily.

Additionally, we’re going to be creating a full marketplace of add-ons here on Warfare Plugins.com. Some of the add-ons will be created by our team and we’ll also be allowing for third party developers to sell their add-ons as well.

All third party add-ons will be meticulously inspected by our team to assure they are up to our strict standards. We are already in talks with several third-party developers whom we are very excited to work with.

If you are interested in becoming one of our trusted developers and have an idea for an add-on, take a look at our Developers: Getting Started page.

Lastly, even if you’re not a developer but you have an idea (or request) for an add-on, please let us know in the comments below!