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Share Button

An Introduction

Simple, light, flexible, and good-looking share button. See it in action!

Why Should You Use This?

All major social networks have their own share widgets you can put on your page, but this isn't ideal for a variety of reasons:

  1. They tend to be slow-loading.
  2. They inject extra javascript and DOM elements into your page making it slower.
  3. They generally aren't customizable enough to fit the design of your site.
  4. Managing each provider's code snippets etc is repetitive and needless. Additionally, they can make your front-end code quite messy.
  5. The buttons themselves take up a lot of space (especially the Facebook share button).

Let's take a quick look at the alternative, using this little plugin:

  1. It doesn't load any iframes or extra javascript making the overall load time much faster.
  2. It looks simple and clean by default, and can be customized in any and every way.
  3. All you have to do to use it is include the script and call new ShareButton on a share-button element. That's two lines of code total, the script link and the share call.
  4. It's tiny and compact, expanding only when the user actually wants to share something.

Getting Started

  1. Download the latest script & stylesheet and include it on your page.
  2. Make a share-button element on your page
  3. In your javascript, call new ShareButton()
  4. Pass options to the share call if you want (details below)
  5. Profit!
<share-button></share-button>
new ShareButton({
  networks: {
    facebook: {
      appId: "abc123"
    }
  }
});

NPM installation

  1. npm i --save-dev share-button
  2. Make a share-button element on your page
  3. In your javascript, var ShareButton = require('share-button');
  4. Pass options to the share call if you want (details below)
  5. Profit!
<share-button></share-button>
var ShareButton = require('share-button');

new ShareButton({
  networks: {
    facebook: {
      appId: "abc123"
    }
  }
});

Customization

Configuration Options

The share button is extremely flexible. As such we provide the ability to pass a wide array of options for additional configuration. All configuration options are available here: Configuration Options

Styles

Additionally, you're able to customize the look and feel of the button and animations though CSS. All CSS styles and how to modify them are available here: CSS Styles

Hooks

You are able to set before and after hooks when a user clicks a network. This allows you to dynamically change attributes for that button. For more information: click here

Public API

The share button also returns a simple API that can be used to control it should you need to. Example shown below:

var share = new ShareButton(); // Grabs all share-button elements on page

share.toggle(); // toggles the share button popup
share.open();   // open the share button popup
share.close();  // closes the share button popup
share.config;   // exposes the configurations listed above

Fonts

As of version 1.0.0 we completely removed the Entypo font set!

Inspiration

This project was inspired by this dribbble shot and this cssdeck experiment - huge props to these two guys for some incredible ideas and work.

Contributing and License