GMC Social Share — Documentation (WordPress)
GMC Social Share adds privacy-friendly social share buttons to a WordPress site. The buttons load no third-party scripts and set no social cookies on render, the plugin records per-post and per-network share analytics, and it can optionally auto-publish new posts to a Facebook Page and/or Instagram via the Graph API. It is aimed at bloggers, publishers, agencies and business sites that want fast, GDPR-aware sharing with real usage statistics.
Requirements: WordPress 6.0 or newer, PHP 8.1 or newer. The interface ships in English, Italian and Spanish. This documentation covers the WordPress edition (gmc-social-share); the Joomla edition is a separate product.
Installation
- Download the plugin
.zipfrom your purchase email or account. Keep it zipped. - In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin.
- Choose the
.zipfile and click Install Now. - When the installation finishes, click Activate.
After activation the plugin's settings screen appears in the admin menu.
Configuration
Open the plugin's settings screen from the admin menu. The main things to set:
- Download Key — enter the key you received with your licence email. This unlocks licensed one-click updates (see Updates & licence below).
- Layout, style and position — choose how and where the buttons appear. Available options include a full-width
barlayout, a footer widget, a compact Footer bar of small circular icon-only buttons that inherit the surrounding text colour (works on light and dark backgrounds), and a mobile sticky-bottom bar sized so labels and counts never overflow small screens. - Instagram profile link — optionally show a button linking to your Instagram profile.
- Auto-publish to Meta (optional) — sharing and analytics work without this. To enable it, add your Meta credentials, choose the allowed post categories and configure the schedule. New posts in an allowed category are then queued and cross-posted automatically to your Facebook Page and/or Instagram.
No cookie-consent configuration is needed for the buttons themselves: they render without loading third-party social scripts, so no social cookies are set just because a button is on the page.
Using the plugin
Placing the share buttons
There are two ways to show the buttons:
- Pick a layout, style and position in the settings so the buttons appear automatically.
- Place the
[gmcsocialshare]shortcode wherever you want the share bar to appear — in post content, a widget or a template that renders shortcodes.
The buttons always share the actual current page URL, on every page — including non-default-language pages on multilingual sites.
Share analytics
The plugin records shares per post and per network. Use these statistics to see which posts get shared and on which networks, so you can measure what content actually travels rather than guessing.
Auto-publishing to Facebook and Instagram
With the optional Meta integration enabled, each new post published in an allowed category is queued and auto-posted to your Facebook Page and/or Instagram through the Graph API, following the schedule you configured. Posts outside the allowed categories are not cross-posted. If you never enable this feature, the share buttons and analytics keep working normally on their own.
Updates & licence
GMC Social Share is a paid product (EUR 39/year, one site per licence). Updates are automatic: the plugin checks the GMC / FuerteventuraTV update server on its own (about every 12 hours) and shows any new version under Plugins and Dashboard → Updates, like any other plugin.
- Download Key — after purchase you receive a Download Key with your licence email. Enter it on the plugin's settings screen; it unlocks licensed one-click updates while your licence is active. Keep it in place and updates keep flowing.
- Re-download — you can also re-download the latest build from your account at any time.
- Licence — the software is released under the GNU GPL. Your purchase covers the official build, licensed one-click updates and support for one site. For more sites or client projects, ask about a volume or agency arrangement.
Support
For help, reply to your purchase email or message us on WhatsApp at +34 633 168 995 (the same number appears in your licence email). Please include:
- the product name and version (e.g. GMC Social Share 1.4.13),
- your WordPress and PHP versions,
- a public URL or a screenshot of the issue, with any keys masked.
We answer in English, Italian and Spanish. If the plugin does not work as described and we cannot fix it for you, you can request a refund within 14 days of purchase.
Everything included
71 real capabilities, grouped by area.
Share buttons & networks
- 9 share networks — Facebook, X (Twitter), WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Email, Copy-link, plus an Instagram profile button, so visitors share on whatever channel they use.
- Pick which networks show — enable only the networks you want (default set is Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Email and Copy), keeping the bar uncluttered.
- Native share intents — buttons open each platform's own share dialog (Facebook sharer, X intent, WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Reddit, mailto) with the page title and URL prefilled.
- One-click "Copy link" — copies the current page URL to the clipboard for pasting anywhere, no network account needed.
- Instagram "follow" button — because Instagram has no link-share, the Instagram button points to your configured profile URL and only appears when that URL is set.
- Correct current-page URL every time — buttons always share the actual page being viewed (including the right language URL on multilingual sites), never the site home.
- Crisp inline SVG icons — 24×24 single-path icons that inherit text colour, so they stay sharp at any size with zero image requests.
- Authentic brand colours — each button carries its network's real brand colour (Facebook blue, WhatsApp green, etc.) for instant recognition.
- Safe outbound links — real share links open in a new tab with
rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow", protecting your page and SEO.
Layout & appearance
- 10 selectable layouts — inline row, full-width uppercase bar, vertical stack, responsive grid, tag cloud, big counters, footer bar, floating-left, floating-right and sticky-bottom, to fit any spot on the page.
- Full-width "bar" layout — equal-width buttons with uppercase labels that wrap on phones, matching a classic site share bar.
- Footer bar layout — a compact strip of small circular icon-only buttons that inherit the surrounding text colour (muted by default, brand colour on hover) and look right on both dark and light footers with no layout shift.
- Floating and sticky bars — pin a vertical icon bar to the left or right edge, or a full-width bar to the bottom of the screen; floating bars collapse to a bottom bar on phones and hide when printing.
- 3 button styles — solid, outline or minimal, to match your theme's weight.
- 4 button shapes — rounded, pill, square or circle.
- 3 button sizes — small, normal or large.
- Show or hide labels, counts and total — turn each on independently for anything from icon-only to fully labelled with live share numbers.
- Custom heading — add a call-to-action line above the bar (e.g. "Share this with your friends:").
- Custom accent colour — set the accent used by the minimal/outline styles with a colour picker (sanitised hex).
- Mobile-safe by design — the sticky-bottom bar goes compact icon-only on small screens so long labels and counts never overflow the viewport.
Placement & injection
- Automatic injection into articles/posts — drop the bar into content automatically, before, after or both around the body text, with no template editing.
- Shortcode placement — put the bar exactly where you want with
{gmcsocialshare}(Joomla) /[gmcsocialshare](WordPress); an explicit shortcode always wins over auto-inject. - Context control (Joomla) — choose whether auto-inject runs on single articles only or across article/featured/category views.
- Footer/sidebar module (Joomla) — the
mod_gmcsocialsharemodule places a share bar in any template position, sharing the current page. - Footer/sidebar widget (WordPress) — the GMC Social Share widget places the bar in any widget area, with per-instance overrides for layout, style, shape, size, networks, heading and Instagram URL (each falling back to the global setting).
- Page-builder compatible — auto-inject works even with builders like YOOtheme that render content outside the standard loop, where naive share plugins never appear.
- No duplicate bars — fixed floating/sticky layouts inject only once per page, and secondary/related-post loops are skipped, so the bar never renders twice.
Share analytics
- Per-item, per-network share tracking — every share click is counted against the specific article/post and network, so you see exactly what gets shared.
- Your own database, no third parties — counts come from your site's own hits table via a first-party endpoint; nothing is sent to the networks and no external analytics service is involved.
- Live count and total display — optionally show per-network counts and a running total on the bar, updated optimistically the moment a visitor clicks.
- Backend analytics dashboard — an admin screen shows totals by network and the most-shared content (top 50 posts with edit links on WordPress), so you can spot what resonates.
- Accurate counting — an atomic upsert increments counts safely under concurrency, and Joomla adds per-session de-duplication so one visitor re-clicking doesn't inflate the numbers.
- Fails safe — count/tracking is guarded by a table-exists check and best-effort JavaScript (errors swallowed), so sharing keeps working even if the stats table is absent.
Auto-publish to Facebook & Instagram (optional)
- Hands-off cross-posting — when you publish a new article/post in an allowed category, it's queued and auto-posted to your Facebook Page and/or Instagram via the Meta Graph API, turning each article into a social post with no copy-paste.
- Allowed-category rules — only content in the categories you pick is ever queued, so drafts and off-topic sections stay off social.
- Publish on updates too (optional) — optionally re-queue an already-published post when it's edited, or keep it new-posts-only.
- Customisable caption template — build the post caption from
{title},{url},{intro}and{description}placeholders; captions are trimmed to platform limits. - Instagram image posts — Instagram publishing uses the article's/post's featured image (two-step media container then publish); it's skipped with a clear message when no image is available.
- Facebook link posts — Facebook posts go to the Page feed as a link post with your caption.
- Scheduled delay and spacing — set how long to wait after publishing before the first post and the minimum gap between queued posts, so your feed looks natural and stays within rate limits.
- Batch throttling — process only a few posts per run (configurable) to respect Meta limits.
- Dry-run mode — log exactly what would be posted without calling Meta, so you can verify the setup before going live (dry-run is the default).
- Automatic retries with back-off — failed posts retry up to a configurable max attempts after a configurable delay, tracking partial success per network so a done network isn't re-posted.
- Stale-lock recovery — a run that dies mid-post releases its lock automatically so the queue never wedges.
- Queue visibility — the publish queue records status, attempts, scheduled time, remote post IDs and last error for each item, so you can see what's pending, done or failing.
- Secrets kept out of the database — Meta Page/Instagram IDs and access tokens are read from server environment variables /
wp-configconstants, and tokens are redacted from any log message. - Configurable Graph API version — pin the Meta Graph API version (default v20.0) so upgrades are under your control.
- Driven by native schedulers — Joomla runs it as a Scheduled Task (
plg_task_gmcsocialpublisher); WordPress runs it on a 15-minute WP-cron event. - Licence-gated safely — the publisher refuses to post when the product is definitively unlicensed, but a mere gateway outage never blocks a licensed site.
- Fully optional — sharing and analytics work entirely on their own; auto-publish stays off until you enable it and add credentials.
Privacy & GDPR
- No third-party scripts or SDKs — buttons are rendered server-side with inline SVG, so no Facebook/X/etc. JavaScript loads.
- No tracking pixels or social cookies — nothing is set on the visitor's browser simply because a share button is shown.
- First-party analytics only — share counts live in your database and never leave your site, keeping you GDPR-friendly by design.
Internationalisation
- English, Italian and Spanish out of the box — the share bar, module/widget and analytics screens ship translated in en-GB, it-IT and es-ES.
- Respects multilingual sites — shares the article's own-language URL so Italian/Spanish pages point to the correct link, not the default-language home.
Performance & compatibility
- Lightweight, fast rendering — vanilla JS (no framework) and plain CSS with no build step or bundled dependencies keep pages quick.
- Joomla 5 and 6, WordPress 6.0–7.0 — modern CMS support on PHP 8.1+, using only core CMS APIs.
- Zero external dependencies — no Composer, npm or vendor libraries to audit or update.
Developer & API
- First-party tracking endpoint — Joomla
com_gmcsocialshare&task=track.hit/.countsand WordPress REST routes/wp-json/gmc-social-share/v1/hitand/countsrecord and read counts. - CSRF/nonce protected — the hit endpoint requires a Joomla form token / WordPress REST nonce and validates the network against a whitelist, so counts can't be forged trivially.
- SSRF-guarded updater (WordPress) — the self-updater hard-restricts the package host to fuerteventuratv.net over HTTPS, blocking redirect/SSRF abuse.
- Clean uninstall — WordPress removes its options and data on uninstall; the Joomla package's self-heal script tidies update-site topology and enables the bundled plugin on install.
Trust & licensing
- GNU GPL v2 licensed — you get the official build under an open licence, for one site per purchase (volume/agency arrangements on request).
- Self-hosted, self-contained — everything runs on your own server; the only outbound calls are the licence/update check to the GMC / FuerteventuraTV server and, if you enable it, your own auto-publish calls to Meta.
- Licensed one-click updates — a Download Key from your licence email unlocks automatic update checks (Joomla ~every 24h, WordPress ~every 12h) surfaced in the normal CMS updater while your licence is active.
- Keeps working through outages — licence entitlement is cached with a last-known-good fallback, so a temporary gateway outage never disables a licensed site; only a definitive denial blocks rendering.
- Proven in production — this build powers the share bar on the vendor's own tourism portal, fuerteventuratv.net.
- €39/year subscription — mid-market pricing that undercuts comparable analytics + auto-posting competitors, billed via Stripe.
- No secrets in the product — licence keys and Meta tokens are runtime settings/environment values, never committed or shipped.
Joomla & WordPress
- Joomla — ships as a single package bundling four extensions kept in version lockstep: install the
pkg_gmcsocialsharezip (not the inner zips). Adds a footer/sidebar module, per-article context control, per-session count de-duplication and a Scheduler-driven auto-publisher. The content-plugin manifest exposes all 10 layouts (the module exposes the 7 non-fixed ones). - WordPress — a single self-contained plugin using the
[gmcsocialshare]shortcode, a configurable widget and thethe_contentfilter, with REST tracking endpoints and a 15-minute WP-cron auto-publisher. One licence covers the WP plugin on its own slug, with feature parity to Joomla for sharing, analytics and Meta auto-publish.
