New Social Networking Web Parts on Kentico Marketplace

Social networking is more and more important these days. We at Kentico understand this fact and try hard to provide you easy ways to integrate with various social networking features.

In Kentico CMS 6, we introduced a set of Facebook web parts and now we're adding native support for additional networks. There are also numerous social networking web parts provided by our partners on the Marketplace.

This particular package includes a bunch of social networking web parts and some features that make it easy to use them. Below, you can find the list of web parts that are included in this package. For every social network, there is also link to a website where you can find more information about the official plug-ins.

Google+
https://developers.google.com/+/plugins

• Google+ activity feed
• Google+ badge
• Google+ +1 button

LinkedIn
https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins

• LinkedIn apply with
• LinkedIn company insider
• LinkedIn company profile
• LinkedIn member profile
• LinkedIn recommend button
• LinkedIn share button

Pinterest
http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

• Pinterest follow button
• Pinterest pin it button

Twitter
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-for-websites
https://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_profile

• Twitter feed
• Twitter follow button
• Twitter tweet button

The Google+ activity feed web part is not official, so you may not have seen it yet. Here’s a screenshot of the web part:


As you can see, it is a pretty simple web part that can display last activity updates from your account or a Google+ page. It displays a list of the most recent public updates. It follows Google’s streamlined and clean design (similar to the official Google+ badge plug-in). You can also change the look and feel of the web part in its configuration.

Additional features

This package doesn’t bring just the web parts, though. In order to simplify the usage of the LinkedIn web parts, we integrated the LinkedIn Company Search. If you are not familiar with it, you can find more information on LinkedIn’s documentation page.

LinkedIn Company Search greatly simplifies selecting companies in the web parts that need it. When you have to specify a company, you have the possibility to open a new window, where you can search for that company and select it. Our company selector will take care of the rest. You can see the dialog in the picture below.


There is one more feature that deserves explanation. Some web parts can be displayed in various languages (what languages are available depends on the social network in question). But not all of these languages are typically supported by your site. So when you are about to select a language for the web part, you can open a new window with the language selector, where only languages that are supported in both your site and the social network are displayed.

New settings

Some of the web parts or features have to be configured to function properly. Four new settings were added to aid this need. All of them are connected to authorization of the API calls needed. You can ignore them unless you want to use the following:

• LinkedIn Company Search
• Google+ activity feed

All of the settings are located in Site Manager -> Settings -> Security & Membership -> Authentication.

For Google+, you have to set a client ID and a client secret of your application (you can find that in the Google API Console). After that, you have to get an access token which is pretty easy - all you have to do is open a dialog and grant access for your application.
 
For LinkedIn, you have to set an API key and an application secret (you can find that on the LinkedIn Developer Network). And again, you need to get an access token.


You can find this package on the Marketplace: http://devnet.kentico.com/Marketplace/Community/Social-networking-web-parts.aspx.

I hope this package will make integration with social networks much easier. Feel free to post any questions and comments below.