Share This is an excellent WordPress plugin written by Alex King. The plugin provides a neat and customizable pop-up menu for allowing readers to easily share one of your blog posts using many of the social bookmarking or social websites out there. It’s an intelligent solution to the problem of having too many sharing icons that may potentially distract or irritate readers.

Since launching, Share This has become very popular, with many blogs using it. I recently began using the plugin for a site of mine, and was impressed by its usefulness. (And the icon project it launched) However, I had also decided to use the jQuery JavaScript framework (and its plugins) for this site, and since Share This uses Prototype for its JavaScript functionality, there were some conflicts.

So, I decided to do a minor re-write of Share This, altering only the JavaScript portion to use jQuery instead of Prototype.

jQuery?

I wanted to stick with jQuery for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I have more experience with it than with Prototype. I won’t get into an argument over which of the frameworks is better, and will instead stick to the “Unto each his own” line of thinking.

While jQuery generally works well with existing JavaScript, as it doesn’t alter the global namespace, and additionally has a “no-conflict” mode, some of the plugins that I wanted to use (specifically Thickbox) weren’t written for the no-conflict mode. The issue stems from the use of the “$” variable name. In jQuery, it’s a shortcut for the be-all-end-all function jQuery(), while in Prototype, it’s a shortcut for document.getElementById().

Share This in jQuery

Before I offer the download, I want to make it clear that this was a very minor change - no functionality was added or removed, as just the JavaScript portion was re-written (quickly) to support jQuery instead of Prototype. Again, it’s not better than the original Share This, only different. Furthermore, 100% full credit still belongs to Alex King, as this is barely a derivative work.

In order to use this version, you will need the jQuery framework as well as the Dimensions plugin. Their cumulative compressed sizes are comparable to the compressed size of the Prototype framework. You will need to link them to your site in your WordPress theme’s header.php file by adding lines like these, preferably between the head tags.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path-to-jquery/jquery.pack.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path-to-jquery-dimensions/jquery.dimensions.pack.js"></script>

You can then replace the original share-this.php with the jQuery version in the zipped download. (You may want to backup the original file first, as always)

Download

• Share This 1.4 for jQuery

Credit and Misc.

As mentioned before, all credit still belongs to Alex King for writing Share This in the first place. I haven’t really changed anything, just adapted it to work with jQuery and thought I’d like to make it available for everyone to use. It still works exactly as before, so configuring options and so forth isn’t any different.

What I changed was just the part of the plugin that outputs the JavaScript necessary to make Share This work. It’s just been changed to use jQuery instead of Prototype. I also commented out the parts of the plugin that link the Prototype framework (from WordPress) into the header. As mentioned before, you’ll have to link in the requisite jQuery script files yourself. Since it looks like WordPress will be moving over to jQuery, at least for the admin pages, this might be something worthwhile.

The JavaScript has been written in jQuery’s compatibility mode (using jQuery() instead of $), so you can continue to use Prototype on your site if you wish. As mentioned, this was a very quick rewrite, so not much has changed.

Some people have pointed out that Prototype is a lot larger than jQuery in terms of file size. This may be somewhat true, but when Prototype v 1.5.0 is packed, it comes in at only around 27 KB. jQuery packed is about 21 KB, but with the Dimensions plugin needed to make Share This work with jQuery adds another 4-5 KB, bringing the total size close to that of Prototype. So why use jQuery? Again, it’s just because I’m more familiar with it and like how jQuery expressions are formed, particularly with the ability to chain function calls.

Update

Bennett McElwee, author of many nice WordPress plugins (including some that I use on my own site), has already released a version of Share This in jQuery, seemingly two days before I published this post - what a coincidence! His appears to be more polished, though, as it doesn’t use the extra Dimensions plugin and also includes some nice effects. Definitely give it a try.

Firstly, there are just so many tagging plugins out there, that I have a tough time deciding which ones are good, or even which ones have the features I want. (Or even what features I want!) Reading up on other people’s personal experiences, while useful, is also very time-consuming, but I’ve run into a few potential plugins.

Firstly, Ultimate Tag Warrior seems to be a feature-rich plugin that should have everything I’d ever need. Besides tagging support, it also offers support for weighted tag clouds, similar to what you have at del.icio.us. But, since it keeps tags separate from categories (not a bad thing), it uses its own table for tag storage, which could create problems when upgrading. But this is a minor problem, as I’m sure a writing a script for the upgrade conversion would be trivial. But, I’ve also heard some negativity about it, and from playing around with it for a bit, it seems to have almost too many features for me.

This category-tagging plugin also looks decent. In contrast to Ultimate Tag Warrior, it just uses the WordPress categories as tags, and thus shouldn’t have to rely on any other tables besides WordPress’ own. This plugin thus probably does the least modification, and this is good since less is often more. An additional benefit is that no more work would be required in order to display tags, since categories would become tags. It also includes nice functions such as a weighted tag cloud. Yet another plugin, Cat2Tag also seems to provide similar functionality to this one. These plugins would also probably be the best option in considering future versions of WordPress - I believe it’s likely that categories will be supplanted by tags in the next major version.

But maybe the main reason for my apprehension is my unnatural like of the structure of categories. You see, tags have become such a big thing because they are easy to use, and natural to most everyone. But for me, it seems to be the opposite. Despite not being able to deny the usefulness of tags, I would still like to have categories alongside them. For me, tags can be too open-ended, but perhaps this is just in the sematics of how tags are used - I suppose tags can be just as structured as categories. Perhaps a good compromise would be categories for the main subject and tagging for keywords; this would provide a good structure and still have the good metadata of tags. This would also eliminate the need for a nightmare hierarchy of categories and sub-categories. (Ultimate Tag Warrior could provide this functionality.)

But, maybe I’ll just have to learn to deal with a tags-only system if and when WordPress switches over to tags. In the meantime, I’ll probably be fence-sitting, undecided on what to do, and inevitably, stuck without tags.

Update

I’ve decided to go with the simple, but effective Category Tagging Plugin for WordPress, since it uses WordPress’ own categories as “tags”, and so integrates nicely while at the same time providing much-needed “Related Posts” and “Tag Cloud” functions. The fact that it doesn’t create another table for the tags makes it easy to switch out from using this plugin, should the need arise. Stay tuned for more details.