Social Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin that adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of different social bookmarking sites. It features an AJAX front-end interface. You can see the plugin in action at the end of the article (just before the comments section). Furthermore, the plugin adds a page in the WordPress admin section that lets you customize it. See the Customization section below for details.
The plugin supports more than fifty sites and that is without including the sites of the available Site Packs. A complete list of the supported sites is available.
AJAX Interface
Version 4 introduces a new front-end interface based on AJAX. It allows you to hide the links displaying only a “Bookmark Page” label which when clicked makes the links visible. This action is performed without reloading the page since it uses AJAX. A “Hide Sites” label is also present to allow your readers hide the displayed links. You can set from the Dashboard Option page whether the links will be visible or not when a page loads.
Note that the default AJAX functionality is configured so that the presentation of the version versions is retained. This feature can be extremely useful to WordPress blogs where a big list of social bookmarking sites is displayed through the plugin. In this case, the links can be set to be hidden when the page loads, so that it does not feel too “heavy” on the reader’s eyes.
Site Packs
Site packs is another new feature of version 4. The plugin out of the box offers support for more than 50 international English (since English is an international language) social bookmarking sites. You can now download additional site packs from the download section that add more sites to your Social Bookmarks installation.
Note that a template pack is also available for download in case that you want to develop and release your custom pack. I am actively looking for volunteers to develop and maintain site packs. if you are interested, drop an email through the contact form.
Download
The plugin is provided as a compressed zip file. You can use any program that can uncompress zip files (like IZArc or StuffIt) to extract the plugin.
Submit a Problem or Feature Request
If you have downloaded the plugin and either you spotted a problem with it or have an idea for a new feature, then please use this issue tracking system to report it rather than a comment in this page.
Don’t forget to include as much information as possible and check whether someone else has submitted the same issue before you press the submit button.
Release Notes
When a new version of the plugin is made available, the release notes are updated.
Updating
If you are updating from a previous version then it is advisable to remove the installation of your previous version before you install the new one (your setting will be retained):
- De-activate the plugin from the Plugins menu of your WordPress admin section.
- Delete the plugin directory from wp-contents/plugins.
- Extract the plugin on your computer and upload the social-bookmarks directory to wp-contents/plugins.
- Finally, activate the ‘Social Bookmarks’ plugin from the Plugins menu.
Installation
- Upload the social_bookmarks directory to your wp-content/plugins/ directory so that you have a new directory ‘social-bookmarks’ within your plugins directory.
- Finally, activate the plugin from your Plugins page on your WordPress administration page.
Customization
The plugin features an Options page in the WordPress admin section. You can select which sites are displayed, whether the links will open in a new window or in the current page. Also, you can change the heading that appears above the links which can be really useful to non-english sites. If you have pages in your site then you can select a sub-set of them (or even all of them) where the links won’t appear.
You can also specify to display the links in up to five lines. The AJAX interface can also be customized. It can be disabled, change the initial state and also alter the speed of the AJAX collapsible interface. You can set the plugin to be visible in the blog listing (index.php) and/or in the single post page.
The plugin uses a stylesheet (social_bookmarks.css) which you can modify to integrate it further with your theme.