Simple Share on Twitter Social Link

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At the moment it seems to be fashionable to add social networking links to your website. Recently a client wanted a quick and simple link to share a post on Twitter. The Twitter API is comprehensive but can be daunting for those with less advanced coding skills.

We can skip the complexities for the API and use a simple string in a URL to create our link. The code is straight forward enough:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading http://www.domain.com/post-url" title="Click to share this post on Twitter">Share on Twitter</a>

Share this page on Twitter.

Test the link above to share this post on Twitter.

If you’re using a CMS and want to automatically use the posts permalink you can do so, I have included the code for a few popular CMS. We use the PHP function rawurlencode to make sure spaces in your string are replaced with it’s encoded equivalent.

Wordpress

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<?php rawurlencode('Currently reading ' . the_permalink(false)); ?>" title="Click to share this post on Twitte"”>Share on Twitter</a>

Textpattern

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<txp:php>rawurlencode('Currently reading ');</txp:php&gt:<txp:permlink />" title="Click to share this post on Twitter">Share on Twitter</a>

ExpressionEngine

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<?php rawurlencode('Currently reading '); ?>{permalink="weblog/archives"}" title="Click to share this post on Twitter">Share on Twitter</a>

In this example we specify a template group/template with the entry ID that will automatically be added. You could also simply use {permalink} without specifying a template depending on your setup.

This article was posted on 25 June 2010 in Code, ExpressionEngine, Textpattern

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