Social Media Toolkit Beta

We have a new Dreamweaver extension nearly ready for release, called Social Media Toolkit, and we'd like to put it out to you all for beta testing. Social Media Toolkit allows you to quickly insert “Share” buttons for the most popular social networking websites. This extension includes interfaces for adding a Facebook Like feature, as well as a Facebook commenting feature to your page.

Each interface can be accessed from the following locations in Dreamweaver:
WebAssist > Social Media > Insert Share Buttons
WebAssist > Social Media > Insert Facebook Comments
WebAssist > Social Media > Insert Facebook Like

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Download Social Media Toolkit beta build 010
Serial #: 6YbTR-pwOYf-0yEVL-vSDWR

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Thank you for any feedback you can provide.

So far I am loving this extension.

I wish there was a way to change the size of icons in the "share" portion of the extensions. The icons are good but a little small for some uses. I think a great option would be to have "small" icons (like there are now) and "large" that have more of 48 x 48 size.

Best regards,

Brian

An issue I have been having with the share buttons:

When using the counter style and using dynamic parameters on the URL, I was using the Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz counters - but could only get the Google Buzz to work correctly.

While all three counters look good, clicking the Facebook like will result in showing a like for every single item. So, going to "(url)/example.php?id=1" and "(url)/example.php?id=2" will both show the 1 like. When tweeting, the tweet goes out fine - but upon returning to the page, they twitter count always gets reset to zero.

With the above issue I mentioned with counters not working, it looks like this is because the extension is using URL encoding. While it is a URL that is the link, it needs to not be encoded so that the PHP is processed correctly. The URL is actually in the body and needs to be processed with any dynamic variables in standard code first to create the link.

So, where I had put in the dialog box this:

http://mix1079fm.com/event.php?id=<?php echo $row_ei['id']; ?>

The code instead would put this on the end:

id=%3C?php%20echo%20$row_ei%5B%27id%27%5D

As you can see, while that is fine for URL encoding, the PHP won't process correctly and therefore won't establish the parameter correctly for processing.

I went through and hand coded the URL parameter and that fixed all the problems. So, my recommendation would be to remove the URL encoding that gets executed from the dialog box.

Best regards,

Brian

Thank you Brian. The product manager for this extension will be back in the office next week and will work with you then.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your great feedback!

The suggestion regarding the icon sizes is great and we will note that for a future update.

We are looking into the url encoding issue you've described and will let you know when a new build is available for you to try out.

-Neil

Hey Neil,

One other issue that should be noted with the URL for the share buttons that I encountered.

I noticed that when the page for the link resolves in the dialog box; if you have a testing server defined, the url will use that definition rather than what might be the actual URL.

For example, I might have a site that online is "example.com". But my testing server is just set up and defined in DW as "http://example/". I do this on my box that way, so on my testing server, there is no dot com (or whatever extension) and then I just type in ".com" to see the live production version.

But in the dialog box, it will just pull it as "http://example/page.php" rather than "http://example.com/page.php".

Now, while I think people should be smart enough to change that, I also know the reality that there are people that will say it doesn't work because they want to extension to "think" for them too.

So my suggestion would be to use the PHP Server Name variable to automatically pull the server root and then just allow for selecting the page in the dialog with the correct parameters.

So the extension would write this before the page:

<?php $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; ?>/page.php

Best regards,

Brian

Hey guys,

Any more thoughts on this extension and possible updates?

I was hoping more would happen with it. I think it is really exciting and really does offer a lot of exciting possibilities and opportunities.

One of the other things I would love to see which sort of falls under the "social" banner now would be a quick way to create RSS (XML feeds).

Maybe something where the extension would ask for particular set of bindings such as title, timestamp, content, etc. and then it would create an RSS/XML feed page that could then easily linked to. To me, that would really put this extension over the top and offer something unique.

Best regards,

Brian

Hey Brian,

Thanks for the feedback you provided. It's been a busy time getting this out along with the other products in development.

Your feedback was very helpful and we really appreciate the assistance.

We hope that this extension is one that we can continue to add to as often as possible. The RSS suggestion is a good one and we will consider that in the future, along with other services that we could include.

Now that this version of the product has been released, we will close this beta and open a new one if we introduce new features.

Thanks again for your help!

-Neil