Hmm, there are nice-looking media share buttons available by third
parties (e.g., AddThis:
http://www.jroller.com/gmazza/entry/apache_roller_blogging#rol10). I
don't think we need to re-invent the wheel by developing (and needing to
maintain) our own, especially if they end up looking not as good as the
commercial equivalents. Also, I'm reluctant for us to standardize on
one company's media buttons, partly because we're a non-profit and
shouldn't be sponsoring a particular commercial company's widgets over
the others.
As for Google Analytics, which I also use, again, there are multiple
companies offering similar services and I'm not sure we want to tie
ourselves down to a single commercial company. (Some don't like GA:
http://www.thegooglecache.com/white-hat-seo/why-i-am-dropping-google-analytics-in-2013-piwik-here-i-come/)
A blog owner just needs to plug in the maybe 6-line snippet provided by
the company into his blog template for tracking to be activated. Not
much is gained by already coding in an empty snippet where the user will
have to plug in his tracking code vs. just having the user
copy-and-paste the entire snippet. Another problem with the former is
once the snippet changes it's a maintenance headache on our side to keep
it up-to-date. Also, if a user doesn't use GA the blog may still be
alerting Google even if no key is put in the snippet; users might not
appreciate Google being informed without their knowledge of everyone who
is hitting their website.
If Roller was a programming language, it would be 3rd generation
language not a 4th generation one like WordPress or Google Blogger where
everything is done and pre-packaged for you. Its niche is primarily
Java developers who don't mind working directly with Velocity, Tomcat,
MySQL, 3rd party widgets, search engines, usage trackers, etc. in
exchange for having full control over what they want to do. It is all
this freedom that is probably why you came to us instead of
WordPress/Blogger, starting to push users into particular 3rd party
services would probably be a step back for us.
That said, this is just my $0.02. If you put your theme in GitHub we'll
all have a better idea of what you have in mind.
Cheers,
Glen
On 11/29/2013 08:37 AM, Gaurav wrote:
Hello,
I found the social media share buttons missing in Roller. I have
implemented it in my theme, Is there any specific reason that the
social media share plugins are missing ? Also, we can have google
analytics tracking code by default in the themes so user just have to
place there GA-ID to activate tracking. As all blogging platform
provide this thing by default, what you suggest ?
