I recently received some feedback from readers who wanted the ability to share articles on this site across social media. What better way to do that than with sharing buttons? One of the plugins recommended to me was Social Rocket. Social Rocket is free, active on more than 2,000 sites, and has been updated within the last twelve months.
Configuring which social media sites to display buttons for is simple enough. Clicking the Inline Buttons menu option presents a list of networks where I can add or remove buttons. I can also configure which buttons are displayed on the mobile version of the site.
Setting things up was the easy part and by and large, it works as advertised. However, there is one very annoying gripe I have about this plugin. When I start a new post, at the bottom of the editor, there is a meta box area called Social Rocket Settings. This box contains settings to add a social media image, title, description, etc and it’s open by default.
I don’t use these settings and I’m not sure I ever will. In addition to being open by default when adding new posts, it’s also the top meta box and open by default on Custom Post Types. So when I add a new podcast episode using the Podcast post type, the first thing I see on the screen is the Social Rocket Settings.
It’s also worth noting that if I collapse the settings and put the box below the Podcast Episode Details box, the state is not saved. This means I have to perform the process of collapsing the box and moving it down every time I add a new episode. These annoyances are not dealbreakers but it would be great if I could either hide this meta box from displaying or have the box remember that I left it closed and in the bottom position.
Other than these small grievances, the plugin works as advertised and provides the functionality I was looking for.
When not a lot of features are needed I have always been a fan of Scriptless Social Sharing.