@jibberjab well, I think that you also made some presumptions :-). You mentioned many plugins foccused on social media, I mean, third-parties developing products over the WordPress platform. A default WP site has zero social media integration.

IMHO, comparing how the WP community evolves to integrate more and more features like this (and hundreds more) is at least unfair, when we talk about their 25% market share against our 0,1%, as you pointed out. There is a huge difference on how many people offering and demanding different sort of things.

I do agree with going to a more social networks integrated b2evolution would be a must. However, develop and integrate such features like this into the core, considering that the development team is mainly focussed on architecture + security + bug fixing + skins (another ancient pending debt that is already being paid) is by far slower than having a bunch of people focussed on a single task only: a plugin that implements X feature.

In addition to above, the b2evolution development process follows a partially community driven model, so it's a fact that if a feature is not still available (even knowing it should be) is because there is not too many people actually asking for it, and its priority remains lower than others.

Maybe this thread could work as a definitve starting point. For example, what would you expect from a b2evolution Twitter Cards integration? What features/UX/etc can we take from those WP plugins that you mentioned?

Regards!

@jibberjab Got something done quickly: http://forums.b2evolution.net/twitter-card-plugin

@mgsolipa
The point I was making was less about what's included in the base installation and more about the demand for twitter card types. The fact that the wordpress community has taken it upon themselves to develop 180+ twitter card plugins and 1000+ social media plugins is evidence of the demand for twitter cards and social media integration. There's no reason to think that b2evolution users wouldn't want the same kind of integration and SEO benefit.

I was looking at this page recently which looks to be a good approach at covering multiple services with unified templates.
https://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123
The standard or full templates look like they'd be solid approaches.

@tilqicom
Thanks for that plugin. I'm going to test it out over the next few days and see how it goes. Check out the link I posted in this post. It's a good way to hit multiple social sites using the same or overlapping tags, which seems maybe a simpler approach than developing separate plugins for every service...

@jibberjab Thank you for the Moz link. We are currently working pretty hard on the REST API which is a pre-requisite for many advanced integrations. Then we will work on integrations between b2evolution and many other things, including social media. Some will be handled by plugins, some in the core. The Moz link is a good starting point for us to use.

Note about twitter cards specifically:

• They do not have REST as a prereq. I'm only telling the above to give a broader perspective on what we're up to.
• Their use has grown a lot since I wrote what you quoted me on.

Anyways, we hear you and will address this shortly.

I'm moving this topic to the feature requests forum.

If you have more specific social media integration you want us to tackle first, feel free to post them.

Thank you.

@tilqicom

Is there a way for the plugin you created to be backward compatible to b2evo v5.xx?