Social Sharing buttons are a great way to get your message across to your potential customers and to generate traffic to your website.
They should be fast, in line with your website UI AND consistent over all pages on your website.
Kunena comes with the jssocials script out of the box to display Social Sharing buttons on your forum, but these buttons lack some functionality:
- You need to configure and style your buttons in two or more places: the Kunena sharing buttons can not be used on Joomla! articles, K2, Easyblog, etc.
- No (shared) custom css option to have the buttons in sync with your web-site's look and feel
- No UTM codes (for Google Analytics) on the shared URL's: who is sharing what and where...
- No configuration of which buttons to show and which not
- No configuration of the order the buttons should be shown in
- No configuration of which buttons to show on which device (desktop, tablet, phone
- No custom labels on the buttons
- No label / counter configuration
- No responsive buttons
- No 'direct' implementation of new buttons: like Telegram, Viber, Pocket, Facebook Like box
- and probably some more :)
More then a year ago I have proposed a change to Kunena to add the possibility of adding a customizable {tag} to the Social Sharing position: unfortunately there was initially no interest from the Kunena developers to pick up this feature request.
Luckily for us, Kunena is open to code changes from the community and I decided to build this Feature myself into Kunena: that change got excepted some time ago :)
Starting with Kunena version 5.0.12 there is even more!
I have done 2 additional changes to Kunena that got accepted into version 5.0.12:
- Add Social buttons to List view
- Add Social buttons to category / index view
With these changes it is possible to add consistent Social Sharing buttons to Kunena! No more adding and maintaining Custom HTML modules with the needed code to these views!
Bla bla bla, just tell me how to do it...
For these instructions I am using my own ochJSsocials plugin, but any plugin that handles {tags} can be used.
- In the back-end go to Components > Kunena >Templates
- Open your Crypsis (or Crypsis3) template
- Click the [Features] tab
- Set ‘Display Social Share’ to value ‘Custom Tag’
- Set ‘Social Share Custom Tag’ to value ‘{jssocials call2action="Top Support!", via="", buttonorder="T,F,G", hashtags="joomla"}’
The displaying of the Socials Sharing Buttons is now handled by the plugin that handles the {jssocials... tag. In my case that is the ochJSsocials plugin.
What will happen now is that on the index pages, the recent page, the category pages and on every topic, the (in my example) Twitter, Facebook and Google button will appear and a call2action text ‘Top Support!’ will be added to the shared title (and for twitter a hashtag #joomla is added to the tweet).
The cool thing of the implementation of the Custom Tags change to Kunena is that this will work for EVERY plugin! So you are not limited to ochJSsocials (or my free jsSocials) plugin, you can even use for example the Articles Anywhere plugin from Regular Labs!
On my own forum you can see the result of two tags: one for my call2action plugin (displaying an ad) and one for the social sharing buttons.
What do you think? Awesome? Or can this be even improved more.
Make sure you let me know in the comments below!