Improved Sharing on Facebook

Raize

One of Vanilla's weaknesses right now is that when you share a link to a discussion on Facebook, the only thing it pulls from the page is the title of the post and a fuzzy thumbnail of the user. When you share the homepage of the forum it's even worse, as it doesn't really pull anything of value.

I did a bit of research into this and I found this create resource on the Facebook developers site that explains how Facebook uses meta tags to properly format and share pages to the Newsfeed and Profile. Refer to the section about "Sharing Rich Media"

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share

You can control the exact title, description, and thumbnail that Facebook Share uses by adding the following meta tags to the element in your page:

<meta property="og:title" content="title" /> <meta property="og:description" content="description" /> <meta property="og:image" content="thumbnail_image" />

This could probably be implemented using a plugin, but I think it's something that should be included in every default Vanilla installation due to the importance of social media these days. It's really hard to do any type of viral Facebook promotion without this modification (even the Facebook Share plugin would work better).

I'm not a developer, so I hope one of you guys can get around to this if you have time. I think it would benefit a majority of Vanilla users.

garymardell

I included it for discussions if you use the liked plugin, this will also show how to do it as a separate plugin.

AdamHus

I added these tags to my site but FB still only displays the url of discussions.

camo

I got the title link and a totally random avatar of a user not involved the discussion, im using the 'share this' plugin. Not really a major issue, since it does share the actual duscussion and every share is a link back to my site anyway. *shrug*