ShareThis and VShare - do they pull the post description or summary?

gharald

I am testing the share function of ShareThis and VShare by clicking share to Facebook. Almost everything seems to be picked up (post image, headline, site name, and link), but the post text field in the middle is blank. This is what I see in the sharer preview:

Say something about this...

[post] post title - sitename
[image] [blank whitespace]
[here] www.sitename.com

Anyone else get this to work?

I disabled all plugins to see if there was a conflict, and it still doesn't work. This is a brand new 2.0.18.10 install.

When you click share to Facebook what comes up for you?

Thanks!

vrijvlinder

It think you need to copy an excerpt of the comment post. Maybe check this out at the Share
This website.

http://www.sharethis.com/

I do know that Facebook does not support shortcodes and html inside the post. Have you tried sharing on twitter or others ?

gharald

Thank you! I haven't tried it yet, but based on your advice, I found this page: http://support.sharethis.com/customer/portal/articles/475079-share-properties-and-sharing-custom-information

They say you have to add an open graph tag (og:description) to the header of the page, or use ShareThis-specific tag (st_summary).

Anybody do this yet? I am new to Vanilla and still a bit lost poking around all the files.

Thanks again!

gharald

[moderator, if useful for the archives and to help other members: my edit time has expired, but I was going to edit the title of my post to "ShareThis and VShare - do they pull the post description or summary?]

vrijvlinder

Yes maybe @UnderDog could kindly change it for you.

I am aware of Facebook using opengraph protocol . You can find a whole list of og tags you can add to your master.default.php in the head section.

These meta tags add a whole other slew of information about your site and they are retrieved by Facebook for the shared post.

http://ogp.me

gharald

I'm not sure how I missed this before, but in March 2013 HalfCat contributed a plugin that adds OpenGraph tags to the header of discussions:

**OpenGraph 0.1.3
**With this plugin people who share links to your forum on social networking sites like Facebook or Google+ get a little preview of what the link is all about.
http://vanillaforums.org/addon/opengraph-plugin