WordPress: Custom Sharing Links Tutorial

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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Have you ever wanted to design and build a WordPress theme that doesn’t use the same boring, standard social sharing buttons that spew iframes all over your pages? There is a huge selection of social sharing plugins available for WordPress, but I’ve often felt the vast majority of them look and feel too much like… well, plugins. They display like what they are: disparate chunks of third party code that have been Krazy-glued onto your elegant theme. If you want your own design and are willing to forgo the ability to display a count, you can try building something a little more custom. And if you’ve got a passing knowledge of WordPress template tags and Javascript, this is a piece of cake to implement! It also allows you to avoid doing things like wrapping a jQuery plugin (ie., Sharrre) in a WordPress plugin (and then possibly having to wrestle with php.ini files and server settings as well).
This tutorial is going to cover adding buttons to share on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Please keep in mind that this is not a technique for your average WordPress user: this is a developer technique for theme-builders who want to create themes with sharing features built directly in.
To view my tutorial in its entirety, click here.