Open Source, WordPress

WordPress Toolbar v 2.1 – Adding support for tinyurl, sociable and a lot more

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WordPress Toolbar Version 2.0 allowed bloggers to catch their viewers on the go. It modifies all the internal/external links in the blog post (except those specified for exception), to open them with an attractive toolbar. Since wordpress toolbar used javascript to enable this functionality, your SEO always remain intact.

Moving forward, I accumulated all the suggestions posted in more than a 100 comments on the introductory blog post, and tried to include as many features as possible in version 2.1. A few features worth talking about are:

New in Version 2.1:

  • Plugin Size: Inspite of adding new features in version 2.1, plugin size has decreased from 100+ Kb to 50+ Kb. This is mainly because, plugin now uses site favicons fetched using Google S2 web service. It will allows for parallelization as your blog loads.
  • Tinyurl: Version 2.1 introduces support for tinyurl. If you are wondering what does that mean, scroll down to the bottom of this blog post and you will see tinyurl corresponding to this post. Enabling this feature inside admin panel will automatically submit your post to tinyurl and display it at the end of the blog post.
  • Sociable: Version 2.1 also introduces sociable. Enabling it inside the admin panel will put the social icons at the end of every blog post. You can choose icons from the admin panel. For an example scroll down to the bottom of this post.
  • target=”_blank”, was one of the most wished feature in all the posted comments. Enabling it from admin panel, will force open the url’s in your post into a new window.
  • New Toolbar Skin: Version 2.1 adds facebook toolbar skin into its kitty. From admin panel you can choose dark shade stumble upon skin or light blue facebook skin.
  • Add More Custom Skin: Yes, you read it right. I found a lot of bloggers using this plugin, wish to have their own custom toolbar skins. However, they just don’t want to tweak the code directly. Version 2.1 allows blog publishers to add their own custom skins without having to tweak the code manually. Read through to know how to add your custom skins
  • PHP4 Support: Last but not the least, support for PHP version 4.

Installation Guide:

  1. If you are trying to upgrade from version 2.0, you can either go for manual upgrade or automatic up using wordpress admin panel.
  2. Manual Upgrade: Deactivate version 2.0, Delete wordpress-toolbar folder from plugins directory, Download version 2.1, Copy wordpress-toolbar directory to plugins folder, Activate version 2.1, Visit wordpress toolbar administration panel
  3. Automatic Upgrade: Go to wordpress admin panel, click on plugins in left navigation bar, scroll down to wordpress-toolbar and click upgrade automatically

Version Change logs:

  1. Version 2.1.x : Enhancements added to version 2.0. Specifically it includes:
    • Support for tinyurl – url shortening service
    • Support for sociable – adding social share icons at the end of every post
    • Facebook skin added
    • target=”_blank” support added
    • Plugin is now PHP4 compatible
  2. Version 2.0 : Version was upgraded since 2.0 is a complete overhaul from 1.x series. Specifically it allows you to do the following:
    • You can now use auto upgrade for future releases without caring to move the plugin files everytime
    • Admin panel allows you to fully customize your toolbar
    • You can now ever choose social icons of your choice to be displayed on the toolbar
    • Choose domains for which you don’t want to activate this plugin
    • Unlike 1.x series, 2.0 do not change the href=”” urls. Instead now it uses javascript onclick event to activate toolbar and hence taking care of your SEO needs
  3. Version 1.1 : Include emergency CSS and HTML Validation fixes for IE browsers
  4. Version 1.0 : The first release of wordpress toolbar

How to add my own custom toolbar skin:
Before you go ahead and put in your custom skin, a little about various components populating that toolbar.

  1. home.gif: The left most home icon on the toolbar
  2. background.gif: The background image of your toolbar
  3. button_left.gif: The left cap image for “comment back” button
  4. button_right.gif: The right cap image for “comment back” button
  5. close.gif: The right most close icon on the toolbar

So by now you know, to add your custom skin to the toolbar all you need is 5 images. Lets see what all I did to add facebook skin in this release.

  1. First of all you must choose a short name and full name for your skin. I chose a shortname “fb” and fullname “facebook” for the facebook custom skin
  2. Go to plugins/wordpress-toolbar/extra/skins folder and create a folder. Name it “fb” (the shortname for your skin)
  3. Inside this folder drop your 5 images. (Remember names of the images must be same as above)
  4. Along with the images you need to drop a stylesheet named style.css to customize the font family, font sizes etc appearing on the toolbar. For reference see the style.css file inside “fb” folder bundled with this plugin
  5. Finally you need to create a “readme.txt” file inside “fb” folder. Open it and type in your skin’s fullname inside this file. This file will be used more extensively in future releases.

Now go to your admin panel and if you did it right you must see an option to choose your custom skin next to “choose a skin” option. Wasn’t that easy!

Planned Future Releases:

  1. The plugin is still not compatible with the Google Analytics and Shadow Box Plugin, mainly due to similar nature in which all the plugin’s operate. Need to work on that.
  2. Waiting for more suggestions and feedbacks from the plugin users on how we can evolve this plugin to serve the open source community

Do leave a comment or any suggestion for improvement and don’t forget to give a rating at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/.

63 Comments

  1. Pingback: Wordpress Toolbar Plugin | Abhi's Weblog

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  4. ECS Dave

    Hi Abhi!
     
    I appear to be having some issues with what looks to be an AWESOME plugin…
    “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent”
    appears when clicking on an outbound link…
     
    Any ideas?

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  22. admin

    Hi Jordan,

    Probably my bad, I have not tested wordpress toolbar on wordpress MU. Shall do that shortly and release a fix, if I am able to do so 😀

    Since  I see http://vimey.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php this link active on your site, I assume bug is on my end only.

    Thanks for bringing this to my eye.

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  24. rez

    Hi there,
    I gave this plugin a try but it is not working. Once activated and tried clicking on any of the outbound links no toolbar appears.
    I am running the latest wordpress, 2.8.1
    Thoughts?
     
    Thanks!

  26. admin

    Hi rez,

    This happened because you might have removed all the domains from “exclude domains” list. If this is the case, can you go in the admin panel and put atleast one domain in the exclude domain list. I guess it should work, and if it does you helped me catching a bug. Will fix this thereafter. Kindly confirm.

  27. rez

    Thanks for the quick reply!
    I added a a url right after i posted the last comment and the error did disappear but the toolbar is still not showing up on outbound links.
    What do you think may be causing it not to show up?
     
    Thanks

  29. rez

    That did it! I did have analytics installed and upon de-activating that it now *somewhat* works. When I click any outbound links I can see the plugin url appended to the link but receive the following message:
    Ooops…This IP’s access has been restricted for this domain.

  30. rez

    I activated the plugin and here’s a link:
    http://giftah.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php?wp-toolbar-tourl=http://www.ebgames.com/profiles/valuelookup.aspx&wp-toolbar-fromurl=http://giftah.com/blog/2009/07/check-balance-on-eb-games-gift-card/&wp-toolbar-fromtitle=Check%20Balance%20On%20EB%20Games%20Gift%20Card&wp-toolbar-blogurl=http://giftah.com/blog&wp-toolbar-blogtitle=Giftah%20Blog
     
    Unfortunatley since the links don’t work I cannot keep this activated for long so let me know when you take a peek. Thanks!
     

  31. rez

    The problem seems to be with our server setup (we are using Lightspeed and nto Apache). If the tourl paramater does not contain “http://” but just the domain the toolbar shows up and no error is shown but of course the link then does not work.
    I am just going to disable it for now, maybe when you get a chance to release any updates you can take a look at issues with lightspeed.
     
    Thanks for the help!

  33. Simon

    Any ideas about how to implement on the site in my sig, It won’t work, I am not using shadow box, and I tired turning off GA, but it still doesn’t work. I have a few other js effects running on the site. Any help would be much appriciated. Cheers

  34. Abhinav Singh

    Hi Simon,

    Just tried checking the following url for your website:

    http://designbrushes.net/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php?wp-toolbar-tourl=http://bing.com&wp-toolbar-fromurl=http://abhinavsingh.com/blog/2009/06/seo-analyzer-v-12-adding-support-for-bing-along-with-google-and-yahoo/&wp-toolbar-fromtitle=SEO%20Analyzer%20v%201.2%20–%20Adding%20support%20for%20Bing%20along%20with%20Google%20and%20Yahoo&wp-toolbar-blogurl=http://abhinavsingh.com/blog&wp-toolbar-blogtitle=Abhi's%20Weblog

    I see a toolbar appearing. Hence plugin is not a problem.

    Can you enable the plugin for a few minute and send me the <a href=”(.*)” onclick=”(.*)”>(.*)</a> HTML code for any link on your blogpost. You can use firebug to get this information from your blogpost page. I might be able to help you more after that.

  35. Jorge Linares

    Here’s the link I get when I click on the outbound link: http://proxieslounge.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php?wp-toolbar-tourl=http://www.domainsbot.com/&wp-toolbar-fromurl=http://proxieslounge.com/2009/proxy-talk/choosing-the-perfect-domain-for-your-proxy/&wp-toolbar-fromtitle=Choosing%20the%20perfect%20domain%20for%20your%20proxy&wp-toolbar-blogurl=http://proxieslounge.com&wp-toolbar-blogtitle=Proxies%20Lounge
    …
    you may also visit here to click one of the outbound links: http://proxieslounge.com/wordpress-toolbar/

  37. Syed Balkhi

    For some reason, the title only shows in Windows machines but not in Mac. Just tried on my PC laptop … Firefox works ….
    IE works but title is misaligned .. then opened it in my Mac and it doesn’t show neither in FF or in Safari… the bar shows just the post title doesn’t …

  38. Syed Balkhi

    Thanks also I was wondering if you can custom code it for me. I don’t know how hard it will be, but I like the features of WP-Bar plugin. But that plugin has severe compatibility issues.
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-bar/
    You see what I mean. I actually want to have my logo on the left. Title of the site that we are on. Not the title of my post.
    Link of the original source.
     
    Potentially making the url smaller because the url generated with your site is way too long. Let me know if that is possible.
     

  40. Maple Nan

    WordPress Toolbar will replace <a name=”#index”>Index</a> and <a href=”#index”>Back</a>, which is not correct. Would you please fix it.  Thanks!  One more problem is that & in the long urls should be replaced with &amp; in order to pass w3c XHTML validation.

  43. Abhinav Singh

    Why not, if you notice the 1st version of this plugin, it provided you a short url like mysite.com/toolbar.php

    However with this approach problem happens when u try to auto upgrade the plugin. Anyways this is still achievable by providing options in the admin panel. Surely will include in upcoming releases.

    Thanks for the suggestion 😀

  46. Abhinav Singh

    @All

    Anyone ready to contribute and help in plugin translation. Any language which you think this plugin should have support for will do.

    I am planning a new release in coming weekend and hopefully you will see all the fixes requested above and through emails.

    If we can have a few translations by then, we can wrap them up for the coming release. Your name and link to ur blog/twitter goes with the plugin release. Will be displayed on the admin panel.

  48. Nicooo

    It is still possible to track your outgoing traffic with Google.

    You must deaktive the “Track outbound clicks & downloads:” from “Google Analytics for WordPress” or “Outbound link tracking:” from “Google Analyticator” !!

    Then you go to “Analytics Settings” and to your “Profile Settings: http://www...” and Edit it.

    Query Parameter to “wp-toolbar-tourl” and Save

    Now Google track your Outgoing traffic in the “Site Search” Cat.

    For me a good substitute

    Thanks to the programmer 🙂

  53. Maple Nan

    I find that there will be unrecognizable code in the toolbar when the encoding of the external page is different with utf-8, like http://witmax.cn/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php?wp-toolbar-tourl=http://faq.comsenz.com/userguide/discuz/rewrite.html&wp-toolbar-fromurl=http://witmax.cn/microblog-easytalk.html&wp-toolbar-fromtitle=%A1%BEPHP%A1%BF%CE%A2%B2%A9%BF%CDEasyTalk%20V4.0%20Beta2%20%D4%B4%C2%EB&wp-toolbar-blogurl=http://witmax.cn&wp-toolbar-blogtitle=%B7%E3%DC%BF%D6%BE
    Would you please fix it?

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