ShareThis is a plugin that allows readers of your blog site to share your posts with their network of friends.

We see a couple of benefits in using the ShareThis plugin:

1. It creates more exposure to your blog site, which is always a good thing!
2. With this plugin, you will minimize the number of Social Web service icons that you need to display on your blog. ShareThis is a single icon that provides you with access to as many as 39 different Social Web services.

We first heard of this plugin from Lisa Sabin-Wilson, the author of WordPress for Dummies. The plugin was written by Alex King and is available for free from the WordPress Plugin Directory. The latest version available is 2.3, which is compatible up to WordPress 2.6, although we are running WordPress 2.7 and the plugin appears to work just fine for us.

ShareThis icon

After you install the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory, the ShareThis icon shown will automatically appear at the bottom of all your posts without you having to perform any configurations. This is the default setting for the plugin.

The only other thing you will notice upon installing this plugin is that in your WordPress administration panel, you will see ShareThis Options under the Settings section. This area allows you to customize your plugin, but we’ll discuss customizations later on.

When you click on the ShareThis icon, you will see 3 sets of tabs: Social Web, Post and Send/Email. Each of these is described below.

Social Web

The first tab, Social Web, provides your Reader with a default of 20 Social Web service icons to choose from. Your reader will have to belong to at least 1 of these sites in order to use this tab. You can see the Social Web services available below:

ShareThis Social Web Tab

The way that this Social Web tab works is:

• Your reader will select one of the icons from the list. Let’s use the example of Facebook.
• Your reader will then be asked to log into Facebook.
• Your reader will have the opportunity to add their own comment to the post they want to share.
• Once they submit the post, it will appear as a link on their Facebook profile, along with the comment they entered.

Post

The second tab, Post, works very similar to the Social Web tab. Again, your readers will have to be members of the services provided such as:

ShareThis Post Tab

Send/Email

If your reader does not have a membership to any of the Social Web services listed in the first 2 tabs, then they can use the third tab, Send/Email. This allows your reader to send an email containing a link to your post directly to another person.

All your reader needs to specify is the email address they want to send the link to, the email address that the link is being sent from, and optionally, a message to go along with the link.

ShareThis Send/Email Tab

Once they submit the email, they will receive a confirmation message as shown below:

ShareThis Success Message

Customize ShareThis

As previously mentioned, you can customize the ShareThis plugin, but in order to do so, you must register with ShareThis at http://sharethis.com/users/register/.

After you register, the customizations that you can perform are:

1. Decide what type of icon to display for ShareThis. The default icon, which is what we have on our posts, or a revolving icon, that revolves through each of the different Social Web service icons.
2. Decide which of the 3 tabs you want to display to your readers.
3. Decide how many Social Web service icons to display: the default of 20, or select from a list of 39 available icons.
4. Customize the colours of the ShareThis popup box, by changing the color of the links, header background, inactive tab background and inactive tab text.
5. Choose your global API options for the ShareThis popup box, such as Popup or Embeds.

ShareThis Customization Options 1-3

ShareThis Customization Options 4-5

Once you’ve decided on how you want the ShareThis plugin to appear, simply click the Get ShareThis Code button. You will be provided with some new HTML to enter into the ShareThis Options section of the Settings area of the WordPress administration panel.

ShareThis Settings Option

We actually never registered with ShareThis, since we chose not to customize the plugin. We found the default settings and colours work well for us. If we ever decide to register, we’ll let you know what we find out, along with any other features available to us.

Cheers!