AddThis 3.0 dev candidate

Thanks, wesku. Here's my breakdown of your feature list:

Features currently supported:

• Display button in full node display or teaser 1
• Views integration: user Addthis as a view field 1
• View AddThis as a block 1

We're mostly making sure we don't break this basic functionality in the new version.

New functionality:

Upgrade to Addthis.com API 2.0
This is, of course, the primary reason for the rewrite in the first place.

Translation support 1
This should be low-hanging fruit. Passing $language->language into the addthis_config object should be enough.

New admin interface 2
Since AddThis now takes its default configuration as a single array (addthis_config) containing key/value pairs, we should rework the AddThis admin form to store the settings in the {variable} table the same way: as a single array of configured settings, keyed to the same keys as in the AddThis API. This will make loading the default settings much easier.

More flexible theming 2
I'm a big supporter of this. I would ideally like to be able to pass arbitrary $addthis_config and $addthis_share arrays directly into the theme function and have them override the defaults for that specific instance of the button.

Enable local caching and aggregation 2
This would be a killer feature. According to their FAQ, AddThis provides developers a certain URL from which to grab the code on request. Someone will need to follow up with them on this, I think.

Questions about some of those features:

API for limited visibility in node views 1
I'm sure I don't have any objection; I'm just not sure I know what you mean. Are you talking about turning the button on/off on a per-node basis?

Support for Addthis in RSS 1
+1 for this, but maybe as a separate module, packaged along with AddThis. The AddThis RSS button is for accomplishing something pretty different from the normal AddThis button, and the basic functionality should probably be kept apart.

CCK field for AddThis 3
What would be the point of making a CCK field?

Also, some features I'd like to see:

• A new theme_addthis_toolbox() function for implementing toolbox code separately from button code.
• Admin settings for determining whether to use the button or the toolbox by default.
• Checkbox selection of services for the dropdown and the expanded menu. These lists are huge and would probably have to go on their own pages/tabs.

Address book fuctionality #596818: No longer supports import of email contacts?? also requested in 3.0.

Here's a possible starting point for the 6.x-3.x-dev branch leveraging API 2.0. No new features have been implemented, but I reworked the admin interface so that addthis_config options can be stored in a single variable to match the new API. The theme function has also been completely rewritten.

This should be fully functional, if feature-limited, but the admin options haven't been built out completely. I just put enough in there to make sure it would work.

Just an idea: Would it be possible to have drupal communicate with the addthis api trough this module so we could for example create a view depending on "most shared" items?

Does the API allow us to query for a list of supported services? It might be nice if _addthis_services_list() could get the list of services via the API and cache it locally. That way we don't have to update the module every time AddThis adds a new service.

There's no API query for a list of services yet, but it looks like it might be in development:

http://addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23360

I sent an email to the API developer asking about it.

I took some time today to flesh out the module framework from #10 into something fully workable. The biggest changes are support for the AddThis Toolbox, which is totally sweet, and the decision to smash the services configuration back into the main configuration form. The checkbox-based configuration from the earlier effort didn't account for the need to place the chosen services in arbitrary order.

I'd invite improvements or replacements to some of the details of this implementation, particularly regarding the theme functions. But I do think the structure of the module is sound, and could serve as the basis for a 6.x-3.x branch which we can start submitting actual patches against.

Here's the list of features from this thread, separated by what's implemented in this candidate and what needs to be resolved.

Implemented:
Display button in full node display or teaser
Views integration: Addthis as a view field
View AddThis as a block
Upgrade to Addthis.com API 2.0
More flexible theming
New admin interface
Translation support
theme_addthis_toolbox function and admin option (#3)
Address book option on email shares (#5)
dynamic generation and caching for the services list (#12)

Not yet implemented:
CCK field for AddThis
API for limited visibility in node views
Enable local caching and aggregation
Support for Addthis in RSS
context issues (#6)
Share template support (#7)
API function to return a links array (#8)
Views integration with AddThis analytics (#11)

Looking forward to the release of this, subscribing.

Very interesting, subscribing.

One thing that I'd love to see with AddThis is better performance. Currently there are some easy opportunities for improvement. Currently the module adds a lot of JS/CSS/stuff during page load. These either block the page load, or just add more things that need to happen before the page is done loading. But since everything other than the button images are not required for page loading, they can be lazy loaded. Here's an example:

$(window).load(function(){
  var head = $("head").first() || document.documentElement;
  var script = document.createElement('script');
  script.type = 'text/javascript'; 
  script.async = true;
  script.src = 'some_script.js';
  head.insertBefore(script, head.lastChild);
});

This mimics the technique used by Google Analytics but more jQuery oriented. You can use the same technique to load CSS, iframes, or whatever else.

AddThis offers integration with Google Analytics. It would be great if this was an option in the AddThis module. So if someone has the AddThis module and the Google Analytics module on the same Drupal site there would be an option to have your AddThis activity tracked under GA. Thanks and great work!

Does 3.0 support the AddThis Toolbox yet? (http://addthis.com/help/toolbox) If not, I'd like to suggest that we add that support...

Edit: Whoops. Looks like that was indeed answered above. Feel free to ignore this comment...

I've been doing some more reading on some of the more recent developments of AddThis. In addition to Google Analytics integration (+1 brucepomeroy), I'd also like to see Facebook Like support (http://addthis.com/gallery/toolbox-facebook-like) and clickback tracking support (http://addthis.com/help/clickbacks).

What is the status of the 3.0 module update?

According to my CEO, the only part he wants is the RSS as seen at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.

subscribing with interest

@NancyDru, I believe that that is just a question of configuration. You should be able to configure the module to just display the "buttons" that you want. If however that's not the case you might want to open a new issue as this one is focused on a complete re-write of the module.

@eojthebrave: this isn't yet the case, unfortunately. In the past, the Addthis RSS button was an entirely separate offering than the regular Addthis service, and it couldn't be integrated into the regular button. The issue appears to be moot, since AddThis has since removed the RSS service from their website.

It does look like they might bring it back as a feature of the regular service, though: http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=25244

@lesmana: It's good to know that I wasn't going blind because I couldn't find it.

@eojthebrave: I was mentioning as a priority setting suggestion, since it is listed above.

In the meantime, I just coded a replacement for the standard Drupal RSS item. It took a whole 5 lines of code.

Oops, sorry for any confusion. :)

@NancyDru

In the meantime, I just coded a replacement for the standard Drupal RSS item. It took a whole 5 lines of code.

Would you be willing to share your code for the RSS ?

Thanks,

Izzy

  $base_url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $base_path;
  if (variable_get('forrester_feed_addthis', 0)) {
    $alt = 'Subscribe ' . $text;
    $button_image = theme('image', drupal_get_path('module', 'forrester_blogs_blocks') . '/addthis_rss.gif', $alt, $alt);
    $addthis_url = 'http://www.addthis.com/feed.php?h1=' . $base_url . urlencode(drupal_get_path_alias($where_to_go)) . '&pub=Forrester_Blogs';
    $link .= '<p>' . l($button_image, $addthis_url,
      array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('class' => 'underline')));
    $link .= ' '.  $text . '</p>';
  }
  else {
    $link .= '<p class="rssSubscribe">';
    $link .= ' '. l(t('Subscribe via RSS'), $where_to_go, array('attributes' => array('class' => 'underline')));
    $link .= ' '.  $text . '</p>';
  }

The else clause is what was there before.

I completely missed that there was an official 3.x dev release until looking at the project page just now. Posting notice here for anyone tracking this issue.

It looks like almost all of my code from #14 was included as-is in the release. A note of attribution on the project page or the README.txt would be nice to see.

Marking this fixed -- issues related to the official dev version should be created separately.