Meebo – Buttons

In this video, I’m gonna show you how to customize your Meebo Bar by adding more social network buttons directly to the bar itself.

[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/meebo-buttons.swf[/evp]

Once you’ve installed the Meebo Bar plugin for WordPress, you can just click on Settings, and look for the Meebo Bar Settings page. If you click on that, then you will see a field here for Custom Button Code. And right below that, you’ll see text here that says, “You can learn more about custom buttons at the Meebo Dashboard.” So again, you can just click on this to log in to your Meebo dashboard, and just as like you did before, look for the WordPress icon and click on this link for self-hosted WordPress sites. If you scroll to the bottom, you will see a link that says ‘Next’. So you should click on that link, okay?

So now it says, “Congratulations! You’ve completed the basic steps to getting Meebo on your site.” And right below that, you will see, “Now it’s time to customize your Meebo Bar…go to my Button Settings,” so click on that.

And now, you can see all the available buttons and you can also add your own buttons, which I will give you a brief overview of how to do that later on, but let’s look at the default buttons already available to typical user. For example, I may want to put in the Twitter button over here; I’m gonna just drag that, and drop it on the Bar preview. Okay, so once I’ve dropped that, you will see an Options link appear. So I’m going to click on the Options link…and there’s only one option field at the moment, which is the Search query.

So it says here that “For tweets from one person, enter from:username. You can also enter hashtags, like…” the hashtag given here. So I’m just gonna copy this…I’m gonna paste it here, and I’m going to replace the username with my actual Twitter account ID, which, in this case, I actually have a test Twitter account – so I’m going to put it in here, and you click on Save.

And next, I of course probably want to drag the Facebook Like button, and drag it here, and drop it here, and then click on Options…so the only option here is a Like URL. So it says here, “By default, the Like button will refer to the current page. Enter a URL here if you’d like it to point to a different page instead.” So you don’t really need to enter a different URL, just click on Cancel, and similarly, I’m just going to drag Stumble Upon…and also a Digg This button. Okay.

So of course, you can also rearrange the order of these buttons; depends on which service that you use the most. If you only want icons to appear, then you can click on this link, or click icon-only state. And you’ll see only the icons here. Once you’re satisfied with how your Bar looks like, you can click on Push settings to live bar.

Okay, so now it says here, “Your code has been updated and will be visible on your bar within the next 15 minutes. Remember to clear your browser’s cache.”

Next, you can just scroll to the top here and click on Site Settings. So you can modify your site name here if you want, and you can allow users to minimize the bar. In most cases, you probably wouldn’t want to allow them to minimize the bar, but it does make sense because the bar can sometimes get in the way of the user actually looking at content on your blog. So if you want to allow users to minimize the bar, just allow this option here, and then you can just scroll and click on Save Changes.

If you want to use the Meebo Bar on more than one blog, then you can just click on Domain Settings, and you can add in your new domain name here. And then you can just scroll to the bottom and click Save Changes. Okay, so now let’s look at the Before and After versions of the Meebo Bar – this is how it looked like before I added the buttons, and now let me refresh the page, and it still looks the same, because actually, you have to wait for a while, for about 15 minutes…so I’m just going to show you an example on a different blog.

Okay, so this is an example on a different blog, and you can see the Stumble It! button, Like, Digg, and any other button that you add earlier should appear here in the order that you arranged them.

So that’s how easy it is to customize your Meebo Bar and actually get more out of social media sites from your WordPress blog.