Cool Social Share Buttons with Share Count Script for PHP

Social Network share buttons with share count can really slow down visitor's browsers that are using your website. Each button has to load the share count from the remote server of the social network. This sometimes causes pausing and freezing. Some of these buttons load asynchronously (async) with javascript and they may "claim" that they won't slow your website down. But this is not the case. Accessing the remote servers even asynchronously still causes the user to experience slowdowns.

With "Cool Social Share Buttons with Share Count Script for PHP" you can still display share buttons with share count for Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and/or LinkedIn without slowing down your visitor's browsers because the share count is retrieved and cached on your server, so your visitor's browsers to not have to load any data from remote servers to display the share count.

Preview:

Copy the data below to your website:

Download

Unzip the 3 files in coolsocial.zip and upload them to your website after you edit the following variables in coolsocial.php:

	/* Edit the variables below */

	$share_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; // The url to share will be detected by the webpage address
	//$share_url = "http://www.seabreezecomputers.com"; // Or uncomment this line to specify URL to like
	$share_text = ""; // Used on Twitter and Pinterest as description. Blank out to use current document.title
	$share_image = ""; // Used on Pinterest. Blank out to use the webpage's meta og: or itemprop tags
	
	$get_count_onclick = true; // Get count whenever a user clicks a social button
	$get_count_minutes = 720; // 0 = Don't get count every n minutes; (720 = Get count every 12 hours)
	
	/* Leave $fb_access_token blank for the script to just keep track of share button clicks
		or to get real Facebook share count create an app for your website at 
		https://developers.facebook.com/apps
		Find your app access token at 
		https://developers.facebook.com/tools/accesstoken/
		Or use "your_app_id|your_app_secret" for $fb_access_token.
	*/
	$fb_access_token = ""; // "your_app_id|your_app_secret"
	
	$use_twitter_newsharecounts = false; // If true then register your website at newsharecounts.com

	$db_username="your_mysql_username"; 
	$db_pw="your_mysql_password";
	$server="localhost"; // Usually keep as "localhost"
	$database="your_mysql_database";

coolsocial.zip includes these files:

History

February 17, 2022 - Version 1.1d - Facebook now requires that website owners use an app access_token or app_id and app_secret to get share counts. The script has been updated with $fb_access_token variable. Leave blank for the script to just count clicks on the share button.

March 8, 2021 - Version 1.1c - Bug Fix - Put inet_pton() inside of escape_string because on the outside mysql sometimes has an error because inet_pton() sometimes puts an unescaped single quote in the string.

2/19/2018 - Version 1.1b - On February 7, 2018 LinkedIn announced that they are no longer keeping track of or displaying share counts for LinkedIn. So now the script will keep track of the LinkedIn shares itself in the MySQL database by keeping count of the clicks on the LinkedIn share button. Also, added PHP curl as an alternative to get share count from Facebook and Pinterest in case of file_get_contents() not working such as getting the error: PHP Warning: file_get_contents(): http:// wrapper is disabled in the server configuration by allow_url_fopen=0.

2/17/2018 - Version 1.1a - Fixed a number of bugs including adding $get_count_minutes to the global variable in check_network() function and not updating the mysql database if the last share count in the database is the same as the share count retrieved from the share network. Also if the count is updated or added to the database because it is the first time or because $get_count_minutes as elapsed then it won't use the ip address of the user visiting so that they can still click on the share button.

1/18/2018 - Version 1.1 - Google announced that Google+ will no longer keep track of display social share count. So now the script will keep track of the Google+ shares itself in the MySQL database. Also, previously a user click on the share button was not added to the database, only what was received from the share service itself was recorded in the database. This has been changed. Now user clicks on a share button are recorded in the database as long as they are from a different IP address then the last click on the share button.

12/22/2016 - Version 1.0 - Cool Social Share Buttons with Share Count Script for PHP Created

Last updated on February 17, 2022
Created on December 22, 2016