One of the most exciting aspects of working on an open-source platform is how fast things can change. And if you want to make something happen you can just do it. This happened just last week and I couldn't be happier.
Adding Social Media Icons to WooCommerce Pages with Jetpack
If you've been to this blog before you may have seen my post about Adding Social Media Icons to WooCommerce Product Pages. You used to have to add Jetpack to your site for the social media icons and then copy and paste some custom code I wrote so that the icons appear in the right place. Not a great experience right? Since that post was so popular and was getting so much traffic I figured this is something a lot of people want and we should make it a bit easier.
I wrote up a small pull request and send it to Jetpack. It's essentially the exact same thing in my custom code but now it's included in the Jetpack plugin. So now to get social icons on your product pages you just have to install Jetpack and then pick which social media icons you want to include. And it looks something like this:
Facebook & Twitter icons on a WooCommerce product page
You can read more about this in Jetpack's 4.0 release post.
Open Source For The Win!
I have to say that this is one of my favorite aspects of open source. If you've come up with a better way of doing something you can submit the changes and share them with everyone else. It also makes the experience so much nicer when everyone is working together towards a common goal and the software is constantly getting little tweaks.
To get the pull request (PR) into Jetpack I thought it best not to move the like button included with Jetpack but if people think that's also a good idea then you can write that PR, get it merged into Jetpack, and included in the next release. Pretty powerful stuff. So far this is the first WooCommerce specific functionality in Jetpack but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more tweaks that make the experience better for everyone.
For Users Who Used My Custom Code
An important note for people who used my custom code. You should remove that code. It isn't necessary and just adds extra overhead. Nothing should break but there's no reason to keep it and it's a good idea to remove unused code.