WordPress Plugin

[adamsfather]

I would like to follow up on article reaction about building this as WordPress plugin.

[adamsfather]

@gicolek Rafal, hope you're doing good!

Just wanted to get in touch and ask you for estimation of WP plugin development.

Would like to build one based on this article and existing static solution:

https://www.xfive.co/blog/lightning-fast-social-media-buttons-with-counters/
http://xfiveco.github.io/fast-social-media-buttons/

Initial expected functionality in some nice way:

• styling the buttons - colour of background, shape of background e.g. border radius, colour of text/icon
• configuration of social media share buttons adding / removing

Considerations:

Please consider limitations of counters http://www.sharedcount.com/faq.php
For unsupported social media services only display a button without numbers.

Thank you for your help!

[gicolek]

Hey Stano,

Based on the article 20 - 30 hours should be more than perfect for such a WordPress plugin.

Probably the most complex part of that would be a good UI for a Back End which supports to following:

1. Auto embed of the social sharing buttons below or above the post.
2. Manual embed of the social sharing buttons whenever.

This would require some general settings which would allow one to define different style of buttons based on color pickers. The problem here also lies with the fact that the rendered code needs to be tested in several themes, to make sure it works both on mobile and desktop versions of each theme, not causing issues with their default styles.

Finally the API credentials need to be verified.

Apart from that it's not a problematic one.

[gicolek]

Oh and yeah I'd surely be interested in that. Obviously we'd still need someone to draft a UI for me to make sure it stands out as there are already a lot of SS plugins around the web.

I'm not sure if the extra work (as in registration) won't be a problem here.

[luboskmetko]

Hey guys,

I think if we are going to do this, the initial version should be very simple to verify the concept as a WP plugin. So I would avoid any UI for styling buttons because the buttons can be styled very easily via CSS. We can provide some example styling in documentation.

The basic functionality could be:

• auto and manual embed as Rafal mentioned
• admin for buttons definitions with predefined buttons for common social media - name, text field for SVG def, sharer link, if it has counter or not (counters for only 5 social media are supported)
• SharedCount API key field
• embedding jQuery or vanilla JS for querying SharedCount

[luboskmetko]

Also if user doesn't define API, we wouldn't query SharedCount and only display buttons without counters. If they provide wrong API key, SharedCount returns an error which is caught in JS and again no counters are displayed, only buttons.

[adamsfather]

Rafal,

thanks for taking a look and doing estimation.

By manual embed you mean use of shortcode e.g. [lightning-fast-share] and it'll display at the place within the article where it is called, or auto setting when the share buttons will be displayed after the article.

We're not going to do floating share buttons.

I agree, minimalistic approach would be better for start to verify the concept as Lubos has mentioned.

Regarding the settings screen, I think "default" WordPress look of plugin and setup would be just enough for this version.

Once we get feedback and it becomes more popular, we can start thinking about enhancements and spend more time on this initiative.

Will the estimate remain the same after learning these @gicolek?

[gicolek]

Hey guys,

No, the project would take around 10-15 hours tops in that case.

By manual embed I meant both shortcode and the php function for more advanced users.

Regards

[adamsfather]

Thanks Rafal!

[adamsfather]

This has been approved to production stage.

Couple of things to consider.

We'd like plugin to be developed under Xfive header.
We'd like this plugin to be developed according WordPress plugin development guidelines and best development practices.

Guidelines:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/about/guidelines/

Best practices:
https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/the-basics/best-practices/

Expected date of the Version 1.0 release end of the May 2016

[gicolek]

Cool!

I can start working on that on even this week a say private repo or previewized which you could then push over to WordPress.org repo :)

Needless to say I'd appreciate having my user from WordPress.org being listed as a collab there.

[luboskmetko]

As we have discussed the repo for the plugin is here https://github.com/xfiveco/lightning-fast-social-media-buttons