New plugin: CoreSocial Pro 1.0

CoreSocial is a brand-new plugin that has been in development for over 6 years, and it was used as an internal plugin only. Finally, the plugin has been expanded and is ready for prime time.

Way back in late 2016 and early 2017, I needed a simple plugin to add social network share buttons to blog posts, and every plugin I tried was overly complicated, bloated, and/or broken. I also wanted to have simple tracking for each network to know how many times every button has been clicked. And I needed a simple way to maintain a list of websites and social network profiles links to add as buttons. So, I created a basic plugin with 6 network share buttons, and that plugin was enhanced further over the years, but I never had time to complete it and release it properly.

In the past few months, I worked more on styling, improved the log, and added a floating share block, a few more networks, a like button, a share to email, and a QR Code button. And as a very important element, I added blocks for use with the block editor. An early plugin version had widgets, but this final one has only blocks (and shortcodes).

CoreSocial Pro 1.0 has Inline and Floating share blocks, support for 7 social networks to share links (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Mix, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumbler), Share via email, Like and show the Link as a QR Code. Plugin has social and website profile management where you can add all your public profiles (there are 20+ websites and networks to add). You have blocks and shortcodes for inline sharing buttons and linking of profiles display, extensive settings for styling, colors, positioning, layouts, and more. Each time a user clicks a share button on the page that is logged into the database. You can review these logs and get various statistics information to help you track social network engagements.

And the plugin will have a very low starting price of $29.00 for a single website for one year of support and updates or starting from $99.00 for a single website and lifetime support and updates. At this time, I decided against releasing a free/lite edition of the plugin with many features missing, and I think the low-price Pro version is a better solution. The plugin is already part of the Dev4Press Plugins Club license, so if you have this license, go and download the new plugin and give it a try.

Blocks for Block Editor

Plugin has two blocks: Social Profiles and Share under the CoreSocial blocks category. For both blocks, you have many options to control the style and colors, position, and more. The popup menu for each block shows the alignment option.

Here is the live demo for both share block and network profiles share blocks. And each post on this website uses a share block at the end of the post, and the whole website uses profile blocks in the footer to link to social network profiles. With all this, you can see a variation of the style you can control and the flexibility of the plugin in that regard.

Social Networks Share Counts

The plugin logs each time the share button is clicked. That doesn’t guarantee that the user has actually shared anything, but that is the only thing we can capture and be sure of it

There was a possibility to get actual share stats from each social network, but early on in the process, I decided against getting share statistics from social network API’s. There are many reasons for that: not all networks have such API, and those that have imposed various limitations and complex API app registration and approval processes make the usability for that very problematic for most users. Facebook and Twitter often change what API can be used for; they even started charging for API use and sharing fewer data than before.

All that makes the development of real share stats for multiple networks very complicated and expensive with very limited benefits. With all that, the plugin would need to be expensive, which was not the goal here. The data plugin gathers is sufficient for most purposes.

And, if you don’t need to have the counts displayed, they can be hidden from the share blocks.

Future Plans

There are several ideas for future releases that will be gradually implemented during this year. And I would like to hear from you what more features you would like to see in this plugin, what kind of improvements to the existing share and profiles features, what new types of share controls to include.

Let me know what you think about the new plugin, and if you have any suggestions or complaints.

To see the list of all the changes in this version, please check out the changelog. If you find any issues with the new version, please, report them in the support forums.