Note: As of March 2018, the Smart Layers WordPress Plugin is no longer available for download. If you already have it installed, it will continue to work per usual. To check out and install our supported WordPress plugins, click here.
We’ve been listening to your feedback about how to improve Smart Layers since it launched this summer. At the top of the list of requests from our users was an easier way to install Smart Layers on their Blogger/Joomla/Wordpress sites. And we heard you. I am happy to say we are now providing Smart Layers as a plugin for Blogger, WordPress, and Joomla.
WordPress Plugin
If you’re using a self-hosted WordPress site––that is, from WordPress.org––we’ve got the plugin ready for you. (Unfortunately, you can’t add the Smart Layers plugin to a WordPress.com site.) To get started, you can either go to our Smart Layers plugin page and download the plugin to install it manually, or you can install the plugin from the WordPress Plugins Admin screen. To do that, search for “Smart Layers” or “AddThis” and it should come up in the results, as shown in the following image.
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can customize your layers through our beautiful configuration tool. (Hat tip to Greg Franko and Jeff Wong for doing an amazing job with the UX, UI, and implementation!)
Blogger Widget
To get the Blogger Widget, start by customizing your code, and clicking that “Install Blogger Widget” button when you’re done. It’ll take you to your Blogger login screen (if you’re not already logged in), and you’ll see that we pass the code through to Blogger so you can install it right on your site without copying/pasting the code. (Sorry, IE users, you’ll have to copy/paste the code into your Blogger site.)
Joomla Module
Add Smart Layers to your Joomla site by downloading the Smart Layers Module, and log in to your Joomla Admin panel to install it. Once installed, just select the layers you want, specify your service information, and enable!
Other Smart Layers Updates
We also released some other new Smart Layers features we thought you’d be interested in:
- Auto-translating layer text into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish
- A responsive design that collapses our Share and Follow Layers automatically into a mobile dock (check it out by slowly shrinking your browser window, and you’ll see the tools magically transform!)
- The ability to set an offset for the Share, Follow and What’s Next Layers in case our default positioning overlaps something on your site; our Smart Layers API shows you how to do this
- The ability to only show Smart Layers on mobile browsers. Though your users would be happier if Smart Layers was on both desktop and mobile browsers, if you really want, you can customize them to only show up on mobile browser (also in the API)
What’s Next?
I’ll end this amazing list of new features by saying that we’re currently working on updating one of our existing tools to include a bunch of cool Smart Layers features. I won’t say what those features are just yet, but stay tuned—you’ll be seeing more cool stuff shortly!
We’re still gathering feedback. So if you’re on Twitter, hit me up at @SolChea, and let me know what other ideas you have to help make our tools and services better for you! You can also comment below. We’re listening. :)