We started working on SocialMagick 3.0 from the ground up. Our focus has been ease of use, elimination of all bugs and annoying quirks, and coming up with a much improved interface and brand-new features.
A component to manage your templates. Gone are the days of endless scrolling through the plugin options, struggling to find the correct settings for each template. SocialMagick 3.0 introduces a component to manage your templates.
Preview template. You can now preview how your OpenGraph template will render different images and text before you save your changes. You can even temporarily enable text layout debugging just for the template preview so you can best understand how the text will be overlaid on the template. The preview is applied on the settings as they are currently in the edit form; you do NOT need to save the template to preview it. No more guessing on a live site!
New OpenGraph Preview in the frontend. SocialMagick 3.0 introduces a new OpenGraph preview in the frontend. A hovering button appears in the bottom right corner of your screen. Click on it to see a preview of your page's social media share link using the OpenGraph data added to the page by the plugin.
Correct cascading of the options. The built-in defaults are overriden by the options set in the component's options, which are overridden by the options set in the categories (with correct cascading across children categories), which are overridden by the options set in the article, which are overridden by the options set in the menu item. This is the same way Joomla works for cascading display options in com_content (Articles and Categories).
Image sources with fallbacks. You can choose to pull the Extra Image for the OpenGraph image template from the article's intro image, the article's full-text image, or a custom field – exclusively, or as a fallback to each other in any combination and order you want. For categories, you can choose between the category's image, and a custom field, exclusively or as a fallback to each other in any order you want.
Image effects. You can now apply opacity, grayscale, and sepia effects to the base and extra image used for compositing the OpenGraph image. This gives you an unprecedented level of artistic control over the final image.
Text stroke. You can now add a text stroke (outline) of a color and width of your choice to the text overlaid on the OpenGraph image.
Text opacity. You can now define the opacity (transparency) of the text overlaid on the OpenGraph image.
Crop anchor and crop point nudging. You can now select which side of the image to anchor the crop point to, or leave it at the centre of the image just like old versions. You can optionally nudge the crop point in both the vertical and horizontal directions to fine-tune the focus point of the crop. These options are especially useful if you are using very tall (skyscraper) or very wide (panorama) images in your content.
Scheduled Task plugin to clean up old images. Cleaning up unused images is no longer implemented as code built into the image generation to improve performance. SocialMagick 3.0 introduces a Joomla! Scheduled Task plugin which allows you to clean up unused images. Alternatively, you can follow the documentation instructions to the standard GNU/Linux command `find` to clean up unused images manually, or in a CRON job.
ImageMagick: Show ellipses when text is being truncated. When text overlaid on an OpenGraph image is being truncated, the ellipses are now shown regardless of whether you use the ImageMagick or the GD library.
Choose between JPG (default), PNG, or WebP format for generated OpenGraph images. You can now select the image format you prefer, and set its quality level. The default format has been changed from PNG to JPG (about 5 times smaller files with imperceptible loss in quality), and the default quality level has been increased to 85 giving sharper images.