Today Facebook launched a nifty little tool enabling website owners and bloggers to allow their users to better share and track their content on Facebook. The new tool provides a piece of HTML and javascript that renders a little “Share” button. When clicked, the post is tracked by Facebook, the number of shares is shown, and via an API comments, likes, shares, and more can be tracked across all of Facebook for items shared via that button. Today I’m going to add to that by providing a WordPress plugin.
The FB Share Button WordPress plugin renders the Facebook share button of your choice on your blog. Via admin settings in WordPress you can choose which Share button you would like to display, where you want to display it, and even provide the language for the link. The plugin is based on the same Easy Retweet plugin by Sudar which you see on this blog.
To install, just download this link, untar and ungzip into your WordPress plugins directory. Activate the plugin, adjust your settings to display where you like (or you can manually add it to your template or posts – see the readme), and it will display for every post you write on your blog. You can even turn it on or off per blog post.
I’m also working to make this FBFoundations compatible so it will load as an optional XFBML tag if you like – expect that in a future revision. Now WordPress bloggers everywhere have the capability to enable and track Facebook sharing on their blog. You can download it here:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/facebook-fb-share-wordpress-plugin.zip
Stay tuned though – in the next revision I’m hoping to add Facebook API support so you can track and read the number of shares, comments, likes across all of Facebook from your WordPress admin. That will all fit in with the FB Foundations plugin I wrote earlier.
