April 8th, 2014

AddToAny’s share buttons plugin for Joomla has officially arrived!

This brand new sharing plugin makes it easy to place AddToAny on Joomla sites and is compatible with Joomla versions 2.5 through 3+. Like our other platform plugins, you can definitely expect AddToAny to support future Joomla releases as well.

Joomla publishers and developers have been asking about an official AddToAny Joomla extension for [far too many] years. Many used Bill Smith’s original AddToAny extension through Joomla 1.5, and those on a more recent Joomla release had to implement AddToAny’s general code or write their own Joomla extension. Code can be wonderful, especially for customization, but plug & play appeals to all, especially when it just works. We’ve struck a balance between both camps in version 1.0.0 of our Joomla plugin.

Once installed & enabled (it’s pretty easy), the AddToAny plugin automatically displays share buttons below each article. Each article’s buttons share the respective article. You can change AddToAny’s placement to the top, bottom, or top and bottom of your content. You can choose whether to display share buttons in articles on the Front Page, or to exclude certain categories. You can disable sharing for individual articles too.

The default share buttons are AddToAny’s mightily efficient and beautiful SVG share icons, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and of course AddToAny’s universal share button. You can add or remove services, use custom icons, and insert custom HTML.

Perhaps best of all, the AddToAny Options panel allows you to customize AddToAny with additional JavaScript from AddToAny’s JavaScript API. This opens up a great range of customizability, and each feature is usually just a few lines or a single line of code. Check out the docs for what you can do. For example: track shared links with URL shorteners, apply a custom Twitter message, apply a custom email template, customize the universal share menu, and so much more.

We’re excited to officially bring AddToAny sharing to more Joomla sites, and we look forward to your feedback to make the AddToAny plugin the best Joomla extension for sharing.

February 25th, 2014

Sharing links from a mobile web browser to the native apps on your device should be straightforward, and when you click a service’s share button on the mobile web, you expect the respective app to open, but it doesn’t yet. AddToAny is solving the problem by bringing native apps a big step closer to users of the open web.

First up: Twitter & Google+

Coming this week, AddToAny will begin giving mobile device users the option to share a link using official apps instead of mobile websites.

Oftentimes, for example, a Twitter user is logged into the official Twitter app on their device but not signed into twitter.com in their mobile browser. So the user foregoes sharing because logging in feels like a chore on the mobile web. A brand new AddToAny feature fixes this roadblock and further enables link sharing on mobile. It works like a charm, and you’ll see it in action by the end of the week.

Google+ mobile web-to-app sharing works just like it does for Twitter, and will also be available to AddToAny users by the end of the week.

 

Next up: WhatsApp

All over the world, people know WhatsApp as a favorite messaging service that works between phones. In the United States, people know WhatsApp as that 11-digit acquisition by Facebook, so truly, many of us are just learning how cool a service WhatsApp is over here.

Coolest thing about WhatsApp in our opinion? The app openly accepts message sharing from the web, and where messages are accepted, links are to be shared. Thanks to their excellent foresight with their native app, today we finally welcome WhatsApp to AddToAny’s universal sharing service, and we’re happy to be the first to include them. Enjoy sharing directly to WhatsApp from websites on your iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Symbian, or Windows Phone.

About all those other apps

The web still eagerly awaits Facebook, Skype and dozens of other popular apps to support message passing (and thus shared links) like Twitter, Google+, and WhatsApp do. We implore mobile app developers to consider offering protocols & URI schemes that accept messages & links, particularly if their service is already included (or to be included) in AddToAny.

Like always, expect AddToAny to swiftly enable mobile web-to-app link sharing as soon as a mobile app supports it. We’re already following up with a few other services right now that we hope to mobilize soon.

As for standard SMS, we wish it worked as standardly open as sharing via email works, so we raise the question: Which mobile operating systems will be the first to implement the SMS protocol correctly to allow for an initial message? Until then, consider using Twitter and Google+, and consider WhatsApp!

Try sharing from the mobile web

February 14th, 2014

As of today AddToAny automatically integrates with Universal Analytics, the latest major update to Google Analytics. Publishers and developers tell us that AddToAny is the first major sharing platform to integrate with Universal Analytics, and we are not surprised, just happy to continue offering free sharing stats in the analytics dashboard you already use. AddToAny was first to integrate with Google Analytics way back in 2008, and we continue to offer tracking methods for other analytics platforms.

What does this mean for your share buttons? It means no worries. Whenever you make the upgrade to Universal Analytics, AddToAny stats will continue to automatically roll into your Google Analytics dashboard no matter what version of Google Analytics your site is running.

In fact, a website that uses any one flavor of Google Analytics is covered, going as far back as the original urchin.js “WebAnalytics” code, the synchronous ga.js code, the asynchronous ga.js code, or the new asynchronous analytics.js Universal Analytics code. Any Google Analytics code snippet (or plugin) is compatible with AddToAny sharing stats.

See the Google Analytics access guide for details on where to access Social Interaction Tracking stats in Google Analytics.

As requested by some, we are maintaining the Google Analytics event tracking method for at least a few months longer. For a painless transition, the event tracking method works in tandem with Social Interaction Tracking. Event tracking will remain in place indefinitely for one of our hidden gems, the AddToAny Subscribe button.

With that, enjoy the weekend, Happy Valentine’s & House of Cards Day, and let’s look forward to seeing AddToAny sharing stats in Universal Analytics next week!