I’m really really happy to let you know that the biggest update that Social Pug has ever seen, version 2.0, has been released and it should already be available for download directly from your WordPress Plugins area, if you have a valid license.

What’s New

Under the hood improvements – Much of the existing code has been rewritten and restructured. The code refactoring has been driven by the need and desire for modularity. In short, the plugin has been structured as a core and all the share and follow tools come in as modules extending this core.

What this means is that now only active tools ( modules ) are being loaded, resulting in performance improvements, and that new tools can be integrated with ease.

New Social Count System – The social count system has been misfiring on certain websites and it seems the culprit is Facebook’s API which greatly limits the number of calls a website / app can make to their system in a certain time interval.

To paint a picture Social Pug’s old share count system would run in the background and try to retrieve the counts for posts newer than 30 days once every two hours, for posts older than 30 days, but newer than 60 days once a day and for the rest once every week. In most cases this system worked like a charm, but for websites with thousands of posts it would fail, given that Facebook would not respond to the calls made.

The new social count system is retrieving the share counts for each individual post when a user visits that particular post. This is all done in the background to maintain website speeds and the result is cached for 3 hours, thus future visits will not trigger the system until the cache expires. In addition to this, for the latest 20 posts the share counts are being retrieved once every two hours in the background.

WhatsApp button in all Share Tools – This will make a lot of people happy. The WhatsApp button has been available only for the Mobile Sticky share tool since its introduction, but given the large number of requests from Social Pug users and that WhatsApp has expanded into the desktop market, by providing apps for Mac and Windows PC, it was only fair to make it available in all share tools.

Display buttons only on certain posts – As you know you can specify a post type ( post / page / other custom post type ) for which the buttons to be displayed on and this results in showing the buttons on all posts of that particular post type.

But, what if you wish to display the buttons only on one post, leaving the rest as they are? Until now you would have to disable the buttons for each individual post you did not want them to appear on, resulting in a lot of extra clicks for a very simple result.

It’s time to put an end to the frustration. Now you have an extra option to show the buttons for each individual post with just one click.

Translations – As previously mentioned in this article Social Pug has been translated into Swedish and also a Spanish translation was in the works. I’m happy to announce that the Spanish translation is now done and both languages will be available in this update.

What’s to Come

New Share Tools – Now that it’s easier than ever to integrate new tools it is time to bring some awesome tools to life. The first two that will be available in the next update will be the Pinterest Save Image tool and the Select Text share tool, similar to the select and share on Medium.

Updating the Documentation – The documentation is already a bit behind what is happening with the plugin and with the new changes, and the ones yet to come, it is only fair to show the Docs some love.

A brand new plugin! – You may recall that in the last post I have announced that a new plugin will be joining the DevPups fleet. Well, it is almost ready and soon we will begin the beta testing. If you wish to help out with this testing and receive a massive 50% discount code for your feedback please register as a beta tester here. The registration will close in a few days.

That’s about it for the beginning of the year news. Before you go I wish you a very great new year and hope all your plans come true.