AddThis Sidebar Widget

This plugin is now hosted at wordpress.org. It is not being maintained as I am no longer running my own WordPress installation. Please contact me if you want to take over development.

I’ve written a wordpress widget to put AddThis buttons in your sidebar. This is a convenient way for visitors to subscribe to your feed or bookmark your pages without cluttering the sidebar with a gazillion buttons for all the different feed readers and social bookmark sites.

Installation:

  1. For WordPress 2.0/2.1, first install the widgets framework.
  2. Download the plugin and unzip it in wp-content/plugins.
  3. Activate AddThis Sidebar Widget in the plugin configuration panel.
  4. Visit the widgets configuration panel and drop one or both of AddThis Subscribe and AddThis Bookmark into your sidebar.
AddThis subscribe setup
AddThis bookmark setup

Widget configuration is pretty self-explanatory. You will most likely want to leave the title blank. If you want stats from AddThis, enter your username. The AddThis page can be opened either in the current window, in a new window or in a JavaScript popup.

You can see the widget in action right here in my sidebar. If you use it on your site or have any problems, please leave a comment/trackback.

History:

  • 1.0 Initial release for WordPress 2.1 and earlier.
  • 1.1 Updated for WordPress 2.2 (breaks support for 2.1 and earlier).
  • 1.2 Minor changes. Now works on any WordPress 2.x.

54 thoughts on “AddThis Sidebar Widget

  1. Very nice wordpress widget, great job!

  2. Pingback: karelschiepers-online- » Blog Archive » del.icio.us op 11-05-2007

  3. It works great, except that I’m not seeing the button images in my sidebar. This is true for both the feed and the bookmark. Instead, I’m seeing the alternate text for the buttons (“AddThis Feed Button”).

    When I view the HTML for the page, there’s no URL where it should be looking for the button picture. All I have is:

  4. VogonPoet, sorry about that. If you are running WordPress 2.2 make sure you are running version 1.1 of my plugin. If you run WordPress 2.1 or earlier, use version 1.0 of my plugin. The reason for this is an incompatible change in the code between the old widgets plugin and what is included with WordPress 2.2. I might have anticipated that this would trip some people and worked around it. Maybe version 1.2 will support any version of WordPress...

  5. Pingback: Hello Mike! | incubate.us

  6. Pingback: matthias lienau » Blog Archive » Link-Wahn

  7. I copied it in the plugin folder, activated it but nothing happens, it does not show up in the sidebar. How do I get it there? Pls. advise, Thank you!

  8. Make sure that you have the widgets plugin installed if you are using WordPress 2.0 or 2.1 (it’s included with 2.2). Then visit the Presentation > Widgets administration panel and drag it to your sidebar.

  9. I’ve installed the plug-in and I have 2 issues.

    One, it seems I Have version 1.0 and when I download 1.1 from this site I still get version 1.0???

    Second, when I added the widget the next widget on order is pushed to the side. You can see this on the site.

    Thanks for your help

  10. Having tested the plugin (and liking it very much), I can see what ‘title’ is for, but not ‘username’.

    Maybe this is a silly question. 我很尴尬.

  11. 好的.谢谢老兄.

  12. how if i want to add the plugin manually to my sidebar?
    i’m using wordpress 2.1...

    thank you! =)

  13. 呵呵,你不必尴尬

    username is your registered username at addthis.com. This is completely optional, but if you use it you can see some stats on addthis.com about what people are bookmarking, etc.

  14. Philip, thanks for your suggestion!!! nice to surf on your site! so many useful thoughts & sharing from you~ keep it up!!!

  15. Steve. Sorry about the version numbers, the 1.1 zipfile really is version 1.1, I just forgot to update the version number in the plugin. This is fixed now.
    As for the strange effects in your sidebar, I’m guessing this is related to the theme you use. Can you tell me which theme it is? The button is wrapped in a
    <div style="text-align:center"> in order to center it in the sidebar, this could be conflicting with some of your themes CSS. If you’re in the webhosting business I trust you’re able to try removing this part of the code to see if it makes a difference. If it does, I might add a configuration option to disable the centering (or at least not doing it with a div).

  16. clys, using wordpress 2.1 doesn’t stop you from using widgets. If you really want to do it yourself however, I suggest simply going to addthis.com, generating the HTML code for the button and pasting that in your sidebar. If you think that there’s something my widget can do that this doesn’t achieve, get back to me and I’ll see if maybe I can add a function for the old-school sidebars out there...

  17. I’ve released version 1.2, which brings back support for WordPress 2.0 and 2.1.

  18. Hi -- The theme is SeaCliff 1.0 by Charles Kirkendall
    http://www.blog-themes.xynfo.com/free-wordpress-theme-seacliff/

    I’m not in the hosting business, we’re blog writers and I’m setting up this blog for the client. (http://www.expertbloggers.com/)

    So I’m not sure where to start. Any help would be appreciated

    Thanks,
    Steve

  19. Steve, you seem to have made some modifications to the theme, it doesn’t look very much like the theme you pointed to. By the looks of it, your theme needs a title for each sidebar item in order to look right, start by adding a title and see how that looks. It doesn’t make sense to have a title of course, but that’s not something I can do anything about, your theme is designed that way.

  20. Pingback: How to: Social Bookmarking for bloggers » cssforwordpress.com

  21. Pingback: WP Plugins DB » Plugin Details » AddThis Sidebar Widget

  22. 我很喜欢你的这个插件.可以让”ADD” PART不再显得那么臃肿.
    可惜我没有自己的BSP,希望有天可以直接使用上它:)

  23. A lot of people using AddThis are frustrated because it gives TOO many options and is just a static button. There’s a new widget called ROMlet that will dynamically update, showing people the posts and stats for posts that are already being voted for or bookmarked and encouraging them to link to sites: http://romlet.com

  24. Looks good to me! Does it work on WP 2.2.2?

  25. I’m running WordPress 2.2, so I see no reason that it shouldn’t work with 2.2.2. Tell me if you run into any problems.

  26. Pingback: Enfranchised Mind » New Theme Coming Up

  27. Great plugin. I have one cosmetic issue though. If you go to my Website, you’ll see that the two buttons (bookmark and subscribe) are surrounded by boxes. This happens both on IE7 and Firefox 2.0.06. I’m not a coder. Could you point me to the location where I can remove these boxes? Or is it the theme I’m using? Much appreciated.

  28. Mechanicki, this does seem to be related to the theme your using. If you can, just edit the code and add style="border: none" to the img-tag. If this fixes the problem, tell me and I’ll add it to my code as well.

  29. Thanks for the tip Philp. I added "border:none" to the img tag in my CSS file and it worked.

  30. Any chance you can change the larger buttons to not show the Windows icon?

  31. Well, the images are made by AddThis, if you want to change them I think you should ask them for permission. As it is I use the buttons directly from their server, so changing them is only possible with some modifications to the plugin code. Other than that I sympathize, may Windows disappear forever.

  32. Pingback: Holding up the river » Drop Down Menus and other Plugin

  33. I can’t uninstall completely the plugin, i already deactivated and eliminated the plugin files, the code of sidebar is the same at the original, and nevertheless it keeps on appearing the elements created for “AddThis” in the sidebar. Somebody help me please. (pd. my native language isn’t the english)

  34. Prinmode, do you have some kind of cache plugin installed? I can’t see anything in your sidebar...

  35. Philip, you’re right. It had to be the “wp-cache” plugin because now I don’t see anything of “addthis” (it’s freak, i’m refreshed many times). Thanks for answering.

  36. Pingback: WP插件:AddThis Sidebar Widget-整合订阅按钮或书签按钮 | 帕兰的口袋

  37. Pingback: List Of WordPress Plugins I Use » Jeffro2pt0.com

  38. I have a multilanguage website, unfortunately it seems they are only offering this for english bookmarks? It would be great if I could just change the image the widget uses to have it read “Agregar a Favoritos” which is spanish for “Bookmark”.

    Any help or ideas greatly appreciated.

  39. Unfortunately AddThis only provides their service in English, at least as far as I know. There’s not much I can do about it with this widget, so perhaps you could send a mail to the people at AddThis and ask if they plan to localize their buttons?

  40. Hi , it’s possible to translate this plugin to french ?
    Has anyone allready tryed it ?

  41. As I said in the comment above, AddThis only provides their service in English. To translate it you’d have to make new buttons with the new language, but that’s something AddThis themself would have to be involved with, so please get in contact with them first.

  42. Hi! Thanks for the great plugin. Love it! I wanted to change the size of my button, so I went into the php file and changed everywhere where it said 'width'=>160 to 'width'=>182, which is the size of my sidebar. The buttons then look great but then I get this error at the top of my theme:

    Warning: Cannot modify header information -- headers already sent by (output started at /home/mawbooks/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/addthis-sidebar-widget/addthis-widget.php:1) in /home/mawbooks/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/commentremind.php on line 87

    Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter -- headers already sent (output started at /home/mawbooks/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/addthis-sidebar-widget/addthis-widget.php:1) in /home/mawbooks/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/enhanced-wp-contactform/wp-contactform.php on line 264

    Obviously, it’s conflicting with two of my other plug-ins. Any hope? (If you take a look over there I’ve switched it back.)

  43. Natasha, I tried making the change myself without any PHP errors. Are you sure you didn’t accidentally remove a comma or something that caused a syntax error? Still, you shouldn’t change these values as they match the button sizes – changing them will cause the images to scale and look really ugly on most browser. The biggest button AddThis offers is 160×24, if you want something bigger (that still looks good) you should probably contact AddThis and ask if they can’t make one.

  44. Hello Philip,
    I’m afraid we wordpress.com bloggers can’t use plug-ins. So I have created an Addthis bookmarklet to help wp.commers automatically generate Addthis links for a wordpress.com blog post.

    This is for any wordpress.com blogger who might pop in here for some Addthis wonder!
    Thanks!!

  45. Is it be possible to modify the widget so that it would display an image loader interface in order to add images rather than text?

  46. Will this widget/plugin work for wordpress 2.5.1?
    If so please update your post at the top of this, and let me know.

    thanks!
    Christina Hills
    “The Shopping Cart Queen”

  47. I no longer manage my own wordpress installation so I don’t know. The best way is to simply try if it works or not. It doesn’t do anything very spectacular so I wouldn’t expect it to break unless there are plugin API changes.

  48. Perfect RSS Plusing Thanks...

  49. Excellent wordpress widget plugin Philip , congrats on it, working fine on version 2.6 on my wordpress blog.

    Regards,

    Andy

  50. Very usefull widget. thanks

  51. Hi!

    I am using your widget on my blog. Whenever I try to open the widget button; like text or RSS, pages freezes on me. Also the tag clouds come outside my side bar.

    Secondly, is there a way to control how many/which tags I want to show?

    Regards,

    Amit

  52. i added the bookmark 1... but can’t find the subscribe
    can you point me in the right direction?

  53. lol...nevermind....Great work kidd...my fans thank you

  54. I wanted to thank you as this is a wonderful widget. Then I saw your posting about the dumplings. yummy

Comments are closed.