Compatibility:

WebSite X5 Evo and Pro

Reporting significant contents in your blog is surely significant, but little effective if you don't have an audience who can enjoy them.


You can promote your blog and broaden your target audience in different ways: the simplest one is to employ Social Media. First of all, remember to share your articles on your Social Media personal or company account.  Then ask your readers to share the articles they like, so to reach their own contacts as well.


#tip - Discontinuing AddThis. WebSite X5 used to make AddThis available for creating a bar with sharing buttons. Since May 31st, 2023, however, Oracle decided to discontinue all AddThis services. If you have used AddThis on the pages of your Blog, we suggest you to remove it.


There are many alternatives to AddThis, such as ShareThis. ShareThis is a free service that offers many solutions to create sharing tools. Let's now see how to integrate it on WebSite X5.


How to create a sticky sharing bar with ShareThis 

A popular way to report sharing buttons is to display them on a sidebar which stays visible when scrolling down the page, so it always stays available. To recreate this effect, you need to:

  • Access ShareThis.
  • Select the ShareThis tool you want to use: in our case, we will choose Sticky Share Buttons.
  • Now you can customize the buttons choosing the social media you want to suggest, as well as the button size and shape. 
  • Now click on Next and proceed with the account registration. 
  • The guided procedure offers many options: stay in the HTML section. 
  • Copy the custom code provided, which you will have to add in the HEAD section. 

Now that you have the necessary code, you can go back to WebSite X5:

  • Open your project, go to Step 3 - Sitemap, select E-Commerce: Product Sheet Page and click on theProperties button.
  • Go to the Expert section and select the Before closing the HEAD tag option. 
  • Paste (CTRL+V) the code you got from ShareThis in the appropriate field.  


How to create an inline sharing bar with ShareThis

A popular alternative is to display the bar with the sharing buttons within the article itself, possibly at the end. The procedure is similar to the one we just described, plus an additional step. 

  • Choose Inline Share Buttons tool on ShareThis.
  • Customize the bar and the buttons style.
  • When you get to the page displaying the code to be used, please note you can find both the code to be used in the HEAD section and the inline code: you need to use both.

Open your WebSite X5 project:

  • First, add the HEAD code:  go to Step 3 - Sitemap, select E-Commerce: Product Sheet Page and click on theProperties button.
  • Go to the Expert section, select the Before closing the HEAD tag option and paste (CTRL+V) the code you got from ShareThis. 
  • Now you can move on to the inline code: go to Step 1 - Settings, access the Blog > Articles section and double-click the title for the article you need to open.
  • In the Article Settings window, open the Contents section to access the text editor. 
  • Click on   Enable HTML Code.
  • Go to the section of the article you want the bar to be displayed at (for instance, at the bottom) and paste the ShareThis inline code. 
  • Repeat these steps to add the inline code on all the wished blog articles.


#tip - ShareThis. ShareThis sharing buttons are free of charge, easy to customize and optimized for mobile. Apart from the ones mentioned here, you will also find other sharing tools: follow the guide to use them, connect your domain so to access the specific control panel. You will, among other things, be able to access usage statistics to find out which content is attracting the most interest from your audience.