Buffer, Pocket and Those Darned Tweet Counts: Version 1.4.6 Release Notes

After initial release it was brought to our attention that there were some errors being caused by the removal of a few functions. This has now been rectified with version 1.4.7.

A couple of exciting additions come to Social Warfare as well as a number of updates and bug fixes this week.

With every code commit, our flagship product gets better and better. It’s very exciting to open up my laptop every day and see just how many people are using and loving Social Warfare to drive more social shares and traffic to their sites.

Our most recent updates carry with them a number of improvements— one of which I’ll probably have to eat some crow for. Here’s a brief overview:

New additions:

• Buffer button
• Pocket button

Updated features:

• New total shares aesthetic
• Share recovery tool now has every possible permalink configuration
• Removed Analytics and Link Shortening from StumbleUpon and Reddit
• Cache trigger only fires on pages that have share buttons on them

Bugs fixed:

• Tweet counts – once and for all!
• Prevent double @ symbol in usernames
• Minimum width for left floating share buttons now works as expected
• Occasional 404 Javascript error
• Custom image upload Javascript error

If you like a more long-winded version of these updates, continue reading. Otherwise, just be sure to update normally through your WordPress dashboard and be sure to clear all your caches, CDNs you might be using to ensure your website is serving up the most current files to visitors.

Now, About That Buffer Button

A while back I wrote a blog post explaining why, despite my love for Buffer, our plugin didn’t include a Buffer share button.

Our reasoning was solid, and it was based on our core values as a company. However, we have since realized (via overwhelming demand) that it was worth it for our users to add the Buffer button.

We’re very excited as a team to give our users this feature and can’t wait to see the Buffer share button begin to pop up on Social Warfare powered sites all over the internet.

What’s In Your Pocket?

We’ve also had a good amount of users asking to include a Pocket button for some time. I, myself, am a Pocket user and would definitely appreciate seeing it on the sites I love.

For those who don’t know, Pocket is an app that allows you to save web pages or articles for later reading. Once saved, you can access your “pocketed” articles on any of their mobile, desktop or web apps.

The caveat is that the Pocket button doesn’t actually have a share count. The reason for this is because Pocket doesn’t offer any sort of share count API that we could find. If their team ever decides to build one, we will incorporate it immediately.

New Total Shares Aesthetic

As the team’s visually obsessed maniac, I’ve been doing a lot of refining to our overall UI/UX. In fact, we’ve already got a full overhaul spec’d out for version 2.0 that will be the stuff designer’s dreams are made of.

As I was tweaking the front end styles on my own blog, I came up with a more compact style that would not only save horizontal space, but also communicate much more effectively.

We’ve introduced a share icon which will allow readers’ brains to interpret what the number that follows represents much more quickly. We’ve now also changed the verbiage from “Total Shares” to simply “Shares” since it’s pretty obvious that the number is a sum total.

I’m quite pleased with it, and I hope you are too.

More Flexible Share Recovery

For anyone who has changed permalink structures previously in WordPress, we now have a fully comprehensive recovery tool that can now account for any/all possible permalink scenarios.

If you need any help with this, we’re happy to walk you through setting it up and implementing it so you can bring back all your share counts that may have been lost in a permalink change.

We still do not incorporate any front-facing ability to recover share counts when you’ve changed domains, however, we are able to walk you through this if you need this level of recovery. Again, contact us and we’ll walk you through what you need to do.

Solving Tweet Counts, Again

For most of our users, when we brought back tweet counts in February, everything worked just as it should. However, a small fraction of our users were still not seeing their counts returned.

This made us sad.

However, our lead developer has been working furiously every since to get to the bottom of the issue— which turned out to be much harder to nail down than anticipated.

Suffice to say, we did it. Well, Nick did it. But Jason and I had plenty of sweat equity in the matter via moral support— that’s gotta count for something, right?

If you are one of those users who was having issues with tweet counts, please be sure to update right away and let us know if you are still not seeing them.

Wrapping Up

The other updates and fixes aren’t big enough to necessitate an entire section for— they pretty much speak for themselves.

From our team to yours— we hope you continue to get the results you’re looking for. And if there’s any way we can help get them for you faster, do not hesitate to reach out.