Ronald Huereca, who has the online handle “MediaRon,” reached out to tell me of his new QuotesDLX plugin. I’m familiar with Ron from some of his free plugins, so was curious to take a look. This is a click to tweet plugin that has an admin area for settings and selecting the display theme, and a Gutenberg block for adding a quote with a tweet button and some other share features.
I don’t have any click to tweet option on the WebTNG website, I know I should be adding more share features, and I’ve wanted to up my engagement on Twitter. So, I purchased the plugin.
Video Version
Here is a video walk-through for those who prefer video.
It is available from the DLX Plugins website.
QuotesDLX Admin Settings
I downloaded the plugin, installed it on WebTNG.com, and activated it. It adds a menu item “QuotesDLX” under the Settings menu. There is some overview information and links to settings areas on the Welcome page.
Defaults Area
On the Defaults screen there are four areas. The first is the Tweet Defaults. Here you can enter a default Tweet user name and default hashtags.
The second area is the Tweet Button Defaults. You can enable the Tweet button, decide if you want to show the text and icon, text only or icon only, and customize the text. There are also button alignment options.
The third settings area is for the Link Settings. You can enable links, enable anchors so that the share will go to the quote, set the anchor, and there is an option to use a URL shortener. Note, if you do want to enable the link shortener then you will need to install either the Bitly or JetPack plugin.
The last settings area is for the Container Settings. You can set the block width and alignment.
Contextual Menu Defaults
When the block is displayed on the front-end there is a contextual menu where the site visitor can select some options. On this screen you can disable that if you don’t want it to be available. If it is enabled, you can give the visitor the option to copy the quote, copy the Tweet, and copy the link. There is also the option to enable the Tweet This button.
Default Themes
The plugin comes with 4 default themes. Generally I think the themes are attractive, but I wish there was the ability to pick the colors.
There are also screens to enter your license and a screen with support and documentation links.
Working with the Block in the Gutenberg Editor
I had just published a post about GenerateBlocks and knew there was something that would make a good quote. So I opened that post in the editor and searched by the new block.
I added it into the page. The short version is that you can customize and override all of the defaults set in the admin if you need to. There is a block button bar that has two QuoteDLX buttons. The paintbrush lets you change the theme and the eye icon lets you turn on or off the block preview.
There are three tabs. On the Appearance tab I guess the first thing is to type in your quote. I did that and it has a progress bar that keeps track of how many characters you have used.
On the Tweet Settings tab you have the option to add a smaller quote if your quote on the page is too large. You can also add / remove hashtags and enter the Tweet Credit.
On the Link Settings tab you can enable the link in the Tweet, enable the Anchor, and you can see the URL that is being shared with the option to use a link shortener.
Over on the right side of the editor there are the block options. Again, here you can override some of the default settings. You can set the container width, enable / disable the button, customize the text, set alignment options, and button options.
You can customize the contextual menu options and under Advanced, you can change the HTML anchor.
Results on the Web
After saving the post, I went to view it on the front-end. Here is the quote block with the Click to Tweet button. It looks nice.
Here are the options shown when you click the contextual three dots menu.
I was already logged into Twitter, so I clicked the Click to Tweet button. Here is what the tweet looked like. Easy peasy. I liked that it picked up the Twitter share image I had set using my SEO plugin.
Discussion and Conclusions
I found the QuotesDLX plugin to have a lot of good options and to be easy to use. My only suggestion is that I’d like to be able to select the colors used for the different block themes so that I could match the site colors. I’m glad I found this plugin and I hope it helps to up my engagement on Twitter.
