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Social media buttons allow visitors to click through from your website to your various social media profiles, where from they may follow you or take whatever socially appropriate action.
Here's the pickle I'm in with social media buttons.
They'd be nice to have in Backlight, I know. But social media is a lot more complicated than just building a UI for a few buttons.
Let's say I keep it simple, adding control clusters to the designer to create buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the big ones. The moment the user wants to add a fourth button for their favorite social network -- 500px, Pinterest, Ello or whatever -- the user will need to create a custom implementation, and the designer's controls are instantly rendered so much useless clutter.
Going the other direction, I strive to be comprehensive. I build control clusters for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 500px, Pinterest, Flickr, Ello, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, DeviantArt, Vine ... That's a lot of UI to build, and it takes up a lot of real estate.
So our user wants to setup Facebook, Twitter, Intagram and 500px. The rest of it is a lot of clutter he has to wade through to find the items he wants.
Later he joins a new social network trending amongst his clients -- let's call it "MooooCow" -- and he wants to add the adorably cute, super exclusive MooooCow chatty-cow logo button to his site. But it's not supported by Backlight, because Matt (that's me) lives in a cave and hasn't heard of MooooCow yet. Now he needs a custom implementation, so he disables the stuff he already setup, and does some stuff, and all of the designer's social buttons controls are again useless clutter.
Meanwhile, who on Earth uses Google Plus anymore? It's dead and it's lame, and its control cluster is taking up three swipes-worth of scrolling in Backlight's designer, and people's hands are cramping trying to get to the next control group. Should I gut it? But then there's that one guy in a hundred, that steadfast photowalk guy whose entire social sphere is managed through Google Plus ...
So I build a bunch of clutter that 9 in 10 users will ignore because they need a custom implementation, but then I'm stuck carrying it all forward for the next X-years because of that one guy I don't want to shove out into the cold, and eventually Facebook's walls all crumble, it's a corpse, and everyone is posting their daily-dos to their pavement on the latest, greatest AcquaintanceLedger, and Backlight just keeps adding networks, but can't seem to shed any of them until the designer UI is 90% social network buttons and 10% things that Backlight was originally built for, and the day that Backlight has to be marketed as a "Social Media Button Manager" rather than a "Photographers' Web Publishing Platform" is the same day I throw my laptop off a bridge and become a Siberian farmer.
Still here?
The solution I therefore propose is that Backlight should not include options for social networking buttons, and that all such things should be built and maintained by the user, either using code entirely of their own devising, or based on code patterns and implementations that we will support via tutorial.
I will start rolling out these tutorials soon and will update this post with links when such exists. See tutorial links below.
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Our first tutorial is ready for you:
http://backlight.theturninggate.net/?pa … age-footer
Feedback is welcome. This thread is closed to replies, but feel free to open new threads in the support forum. Additional tutorials will follow, but maybe not until after the next update (tentatively 1.0.4).
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