Highlight and Share History
Highlight and Share, a free WordPress social sharing plugin, began with a genius idea.
One of my co-workers, Audrey Dodgen, observed a highlighting technique on Vogue.com that allowed you to select text and show it to several social networks. She thought it would be a great WordPress plugin idea and I totally agreed.
I looked at the JavaScript (which was condensed) and decided I could reverse engineer the minified script. Plus Audrey was/is a brilliant content marketer, and if she saw value in it, then others should too.
I took the JavaScript and abstracted it out enough so it could be used on any WordPress site.
Highlight and Share Development and Features
With Audrey as my guinea pig for testing, I began coding out the plugin. It had to work in all content areas and even on mobile devices. The output and user-interface (front-end and back-end) also had to be very intuitive.
I originally launched the plugin with just Facebook and Twitter integration, but users of the plugin wanted more social networks to share to, so I iterated on the initial release.
Available Social Networks
Currently, Highlight and Share supports the following social networks:
- Telegram
It also has the ability to:
- Copy highlighted text to the user’s clipboard
- Email highlighted text to an email address in your network
Additional Features
On top of supporting social networks, the plugin has extra configuration to work with your site.
- Enable/disable on mobile
- Support for adding a Twitter username to the highlighted text
- Shortlinks with a link back to your content
- Advanced options to work with your favorite Page Builder
The plugin is also highlighly extensible from a development perspective.
Highlight and Share Usage
The premise of Highlight and Share is simple: highlight some text and share it with your network.
Here’s a quick animated GIF below to show you how easy it is to highlight some text and share it.
Since users who highlight text are already committed with an action, it’s just natural to show some sharing options and even give them additional functionality such as e-mailing the highlighted portion, or even a shortcut to copy the text to the user’s clipboard.
Inline Highlighting
One of the most requested features for Highlight and Share is for inline highlighting. This way, a user can click on some text and be shown sharing options. Here’s how inline highlighting is setup.
Gutenberg Highlighting
Simply highlight text in Gutenberg and select the option to highlight the text.
For those not using Gutenberg, you can go into the code editor and wrap the text with a span with a class name of has-inline-text.
Highlighting on the Front-End
On the front-end, Highlight and Share has a visible highlighted portion that users can click on to immediately share the text.
Highlight and Share, a free WordPress plugin, allows you to quickly highlight text and share it with several social networks.
Gutenberg (Block Editor) Compatibility
Highlight and Share also has a free block that has click-to-share functionality for the entire block. This competes with other sharing plugins like Better Click to Tweet.
Here is a demo of the block’s output, which you can click to see the sharing options.
Highlight and Share Themes
Highlight and Share comes with several themes so that the social networks match your theme.
The most popular is the Black theme, but personally I really love the Purple theme.
Highlight and Share also has a WordPress customizer option so you can select themes and social networks with a real-time preview.
Conclusion
The theory behind this plugin is that users who select text are committed to doing something with your content. Why not give them several options to choose from upon highlight?
Add in the Inline Highlighting and Gutenberg Block for more intentional call-to-actions, Highlight and Share should make a good addition to your site from a content marketing standpoint.
Feel free to check out the Highlight and Share documentation or download and check out the plugin below and use it for free.
If you have any extra suggestions, please join us on GitHub or leave a comment below.
