I just added (in version 1.4.18) a simple but extremely useful feature to Pretty Link Pro — the social network buttons bar. This feature will put a configurable row of social networking buttons on your posts and/or pages that use your Pretty Links!
To enable this feature, just go to your “Pro Options” menu item, click “Page and Post Options”, make sure Automatic Pretty Link creation is enabled on pages and/or posts, and then click the checkbox to enable the social networks button bar… Now you can configure which buttons to display and where to display them (above or below your page/post content).
I'm personally excited to start using this feature on all of my sites — you can actually see it on this post. While this feature is cool and very useful, it is only the beginning — you can expect to start seeing even more exciting enhancements to this feature very soon.
Great addition Blair!
making yet another plugin obsolete! Keep it up and PLP is the only plugin a WP-user needs 😉
2) Would you consider adding another button of my most used social website (Dutch Facebook look-a-like) Hyves.nl ? ( info at http://trac.hyves-api.nl/ )
Lawrence Rolograaf
Sorry Blair,
Made me thinking an have another feature request to put under your long list. I hate the GD star rating plugin for it’s bulkiness, but I would like some sort of simple rating to post/pages/comments. Would that be a possible pro addition?
Lawrence Rolograaf
Hi Blair,
thanks for this great addition! I had just added some code to my Thesis theme to add some other social buttons together with Pretty Link‘s retweet button… I didn’t know I was wasting time! 😀
Is Digg’s button available as well?
Dont know if this is stupid of me but where can i download the WP plug ins. It sounds like amazing features – but where do i get it tho. 🙁 im new to wordpress and have no idea to get plug ins ?? any help ? pls.
regards
Captivate
You can find free plugins in the WordPress plugin repository at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins
Pretty Link can be found here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link
But if you want to upgrade to take advantage of some of the features I talked about in this article you’ll have to download pretty link pro here:
http://prettylinkpro.com
Let me know if you have any other questions — I’m happy to help.
Hi Blair,
I am finally working a little bit on my blog – not live yet… am having so little time to finish it 🙁 – and have upgraded PLP to the latest version.
Looks great, I am impressed by the latest updates.
A few small suggestions:
– could you add a .htaccess file with “allow from all”? some security plugins “deny from all” at plugins folder level so in these cases you need to manually override that setting for PLP (as well as others) to work properly (the bar, etc)
– if you have a logo that you want to display in the pretty bar, you now need to manually remove the 48px hardcoded width/height; is it possible to remove those attributes?
– Would it be possible to replace the “Share on Twitter” in the bar, with the same social buttons you can now add to the posts?
Many thanks for this great plugin.
Vito
I’ll look into your .htaccess file — but I’m not sure I’ll be able to create a global allow from all that will work for everyone. That’s something that should probably be handled by the webmaster or webhost. As for your 2 questions about the PrettyBar — just stay tuned for some enhancements along these lines in Pretty Link Pro soon.
Hello Blair,
Just purchased Pro and I love it. Love how you have bundled so much into this plugin. I had 2 quick questions.
1. If we let PrettyLink create prettylinks for posts and pages, don’t we lose any value from an seo perspective of those links prior to the change? If you could explain why I would want prettylinks to create alternative page names instead of the page names I had that would be helpful. I suppose there is no way to show the tweet badge or the social bookmarking badges without this option checked right?
2. Also, just to confirm, when we add nofollow to the link, that only alters the keyword portion right? In other words, if I am creating affiliate links they will be ‘nofollow’ but the social media links are still dofollow?
Thanks and again, great job!
-Robert
There isn’t any way to show the tweet badge or social bookmarking options without turning the pretty link auto create on. The reasoning behind this is that you don’t want to post your full permalinks to twitter or facebook — you want a shorter “alias” of it. Usually you’d convert your permalink into a bit.ly or tinyurl — but Pretty Link uses a short link on your domain name, giving you more exposure. The alias won’t hurt your SEO on that page as long as your blog is using canonical link tags in the header or the Pretty links you create are 301 redirects.
As for the social networking bar — you are absolutely right, all of those links should be no-follows! Expect to see that in the next release. Thanks for the heads up!
I am a frequent reader of your blog posts. I liked the recent one and other posts on your blog so much that I have subscribed to the blog’s RSS feed in Thunderbird. Even thinking of stealing some ideas and put them to work. Keep all the good work going by posting more informative posts. Thank you. Time well spent on this post.
You can find free plugins in the WordPress plugin repository at:http://wordpress.org/extend/pluginsPretty Link can be found here:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-linkBut if you want to upgrade to take advantage of some of the features I talked about in this article you’ll have to download pretty link pro here:http://prettylinkpro.comLet me know if you have any other questions — I’m happy to help.