I Love Social Bookmarking vs Social Dropdown

I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons. How is ILSB different? There are other social media plugins that do a similar job. ILSB aims to keep things as simple as possible for both you and your readers, to run with minimal system resources, and to look good whilst she’s at it. The plugin features attractive icons provided by FastIcon.com, is easily customisable to fit your blog’s theme, is XHTML standards-compliant and is SEO optimised by using the “nofollow” tag. Which social media services are supported? Currently supported: Blinklist, Bloglines, Blogmarks, Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Furl, Ma.gnolia, NewsVine, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati. More to come soon! License Copyright 2007-2008 Aaron Russell ILSB is released under the GNU General Public License. This means the software is free to use, redistribute and modify. Happy days! If you like ILSB please write about it on your blog and send a link my way. 🙂

This plugin displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter. Whats new in 2.0 Version 2.0 features a new fresh look which is much easier to use and is extremely search engine friendly. Nonetheless, if you do not like the new layout, you can always use the old one via the administration panel. The new layout should go well with most layouts. The new version also takes into consideration of non-JavaScript users and would downgrade gracefully to allow non-JavaScript users to utilize every other feature (exception of dropdown). Integration with an external Social Bookmarking API allows your blog users to enjoy all bookmarks that are available even if you have not upgraded your plugin past version 2.0. Supported Social Bookmarks BlinkBits BlinkList BlogLines BlogMarks Buddymarks BumpZee CiteULike Co.mments Del.icio.us Digg Diigo Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Furl Gravee Google Bookmarks Hugg Jeqq Linkagogo Ma.gnolia Mister Wong NetVouz Newsvine OnlyWire Propeller RawSugar Reddit Rojo Simpy Slashdot Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Taggly Tagtooga TailRank Technorati Windows Live Yahoo MyWebs In addition, you can customize the order of the bookmarks or choose to remove some of them without editing a file. If you do not like Dropdowns, this plugin has the ability to show the bookmarks without the dropdown – similar to what other plugins display. Remember to read the readme file to ensure that you have done what is needed. Updating You can check what version the plug-in is at via visiting the Options > Social Dropdown panel. Deactivate the Social Dropdown plug-in. You may want to back-up your existing plug-in files just in case if there are any errors while updating. Replace the files in the social-dropdown directory located in the WordPress plug-ins directory. Re-activate the Social Dropdown plug-in from the administration dashboard. If you have modified the GenerateAll() function, copy the modified area and set $overrideoptions to true to preserve your changes. $overrideoptions can be found in generatebookmarks.php. Requirements A working WordPress install Your WordPress theme must contain a call to the get_header() function Your WordPress theme must contain the WordPress loop Most WordPress installs and templates have these, so you need not worry about these. To be able to use the dropdown, one must have JavaScript enabled in the browser. Fortunately, users without JavaScript enabled will see a list of social bookmarks at where the dropdown is. Customizing Within socialdropdown.php, these are some areas you can edit to influence how the dropdown appears. In the GenerateAll() function, you can re-arrange how the items appear, add new items or remove them (after setting $overrideoptions to true). You can already do this using the Options > Social Dropdown panel. Creating bookmarks Each social bookmark is generated using the GenerateLink() function, and the URLs used are created using the GenerateURL() function. The parameters are as followed: GenerateLink($type), where $type is the name of the social bookmark (e.g. Digg is represented as ‘digg’). In order to add a new bookmark, add the following lines of code after an item [i.e. after break;] in the GenerateURL() function. An example is shown: case '[name of social bookmarking site]': ?> [URL to social bookmark page] <?php break; In this example, when you call GenerateURL('yahoo'), the link for this item is generated. The link is the direct link to the submitting URL, usually available as an API on the social bookmarking site. Within the URL, there is some PHP code. the_title() represents the post title, while echo get_the_permalink() represents the URL of the post. Within generatebookmarks.php, find a variable called $all. Add ‘|[your bookmark name here]’ to the end of the string. For example, in the case of Yahoo, if $all contains “google”, then the result will be “google|yahoo”. Credits Several images are created or taken from the corresponding social bookmarking sites and edited to suit the plug-in. The dropdown javascript is taken from http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ and modified. The drag-drop library is provided by http://script.aculo.us/.