Shaun,
Very glad to hear you're happy. We obviously are dedicated to what we do, and we definitely feel we deliver for our price in both quality and support. It's also why we can offer a 30-day money back guarantee, which helps us gauge if we're ever starting to lack in quality control (answer: not yet). Anyways, on to your questions:
1) Yeah, yeah, yeah.. everyone and their share buttons
The reality is that Facebook actually has deprecated the Share button and no longer recommends it's usage. The Like button is what they recommend now, and combined with the Open Graph tags, should have all the features of the Share button. Until January of this year, we actually had a share button in the package, but the code at the time actually caused conflicts with other portions of Facebook's own code (see this
support question
for more info on the deprecation and conflict).
Additionally, there are 2 other advantages of the Like button:
* The Like button text can be changed to "Recommend", which is similar to share (ok, it's a stretch that that's a benefit, but makes for an easier replacement)
* (This is the biggy) A Like or Recommend adds to your pages Like count, which is starting to be used by Bing and other places to gauge the 'worth' of a page. Share doesn't do this.
With that said, yes, there is a version of the Share button that continues to work with Facebook's library. The problem is, there's no guarantee that it will continue to work, so we haven't implemented it knowing that one day, it may cause us more support problems than it's worth. The question for the share button only comes up about once a month (and declining), so it's not something we're putting much time into.
Finally, we don't use the share button, and haven't tested it in a long time. If there's a feature there that isn't encompassed by the Like button, let us know.. you may be able to change our minds if the above hasn't changed yours
2) I've added a task for us to investigate an option to use the first 'x' chars from an article as the Open Graph description (similar to the use image option). It probably won't be in the 4.0 release in July, but can see it in a release for shortly thereafter.
3) Hmmmmm. We'll have to look into this. Facebook allows you to set as many images to describe a page if you want. What should be happening is:
* If there is an explicit {JFBCGraph image=xxx} tag on the page, that will be set as the first image in the Open Graph area (giving it priority)
* If there is an image in the article, and the Content plugin is configured to use it automatically, it will be set next (or first if no JFBCGraph tag is set)
* Finally, any default images are set into the page with the lowest priority.
Depending on how the page is shared (from Facebook) or Liked (on your page), either the first image is selected automatically, or the user can select from any of the above that are set as the OG:image parameter.. that's why we set them all the way we do.
If that's not happening, let us know. If you think it's because of no image on the page (which may be causing a bug), we'll gladly investigate further.
Whew. Hope you like reading as much as I like typing
Again, thanks for the feedback, and should you have more, we're obviously listening. Also, please consider leaving a rating and review on the Joomla Extensions Directory for JFBConnect and/or our support. It's certainly not required (your subscription is thanks enough), but very appreciated:
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/social-...ook-integration/7215
Best of luck to you, and your site,
Alex
A few suggestions
