Share on Mastodon v0.14.0

I released a new (and long overdue) Share on Mastodon version.

Major changes are the following:

  • Accidental sharing of older posts has become much more difficult
  • Mastodon statuses can be (somewhat) customized from the Share on Mastodon meta box (on New/Edit Post screens)

Previously, statuses could be customized (a whole lot) via filter hooks only. Now there’s an option to set them from the New/Edit Post screens. Has to be explicitly enabled, so if you like the way Share on Mastodon works today, you don’t have to do anything and won’t notice a difference.

There’s no support for any kind of shortcode (yet), no templates, nothing. Either you use a custom message, or you don’t. The share_on_mastodon_status filter hook will still work, and will run after (or on) the custom status (or the post’s title, if the field was left blank).

Another, and perhaps more important, change, is that it’s become much harder to accidentally share older posts. Previously, when editing an older post (that hadn’t yet been shared), one would have to explicitly untick the Share on Mastodon checkbox before hitting “Update.” Or use the “opt-in” filter or option; in that case, the checkbox is always default disabled.

Since v0.14.0 (or v0.13.1, in fact), the plugin itself will detect “older” posts and uncheck the box for you.

Another thing that would sometimes happen, is when “Share Always” was enabled (to bypass the “checkbox check” and thus allow sharing from, e.g., a mobile app) and older posts were being mass-edited (like from the Quick Edit dialog, or through WP-CLI). This could lead to multiple (previously unshared) posts being shared all at once. As of version 0.14.0, the plugin will, in scenarios like these, no longer share posts that are over a day old.

(There’s a whole reason I can’t “just” only share when a post is first published. You might want to share only well after a post has gone live, for instance. There’s the third-party clients. There are other reasons to delay sharing, like, there was this thing with images. There’s a lot of Gutenberg weirdness, too.)

Next on my radar is to move to a proper “Gutenberg” side panel for sites that rely on the block editor. The current meta box approach really only works well for the classic editor. That is, it works also for Gutenberg, but it could be greatly improved.

One response to “Share on Mastodon v0.14.0”

  1. Jan Boddez

    Another thing I’ll look into is a “(hash)tags” setting, to auto-append tags. (Again, if you’re doing this through a filter today, that approach will just continue to work.)