Adding Social Media Icons On Certain Posts

There are many WordPress plugins out there that allow you to display various social media buttons on your posts making it very simple for your readers to share and submit your article to various social media websites.

While this is a great way to promote your blog posts, the buttons do not serve a purpose if you simply have an announcement to make on a post.

It would be great if we can turn the option on and off as needed, right?. Well by using WordPress’ custom fields and a little bit of PHP coding, we can display or not display these social media icons.

Let’s get to it

Step 1 – Download the SexyBookmarks plugin, upload it into your plugins folder and activate it.

Step 2 – Go into the plugin settings and modify the settings. You can reorder the icons by clicking and dragging. Check mark the ones you want to display.

In the Placement option, select Manually Insert.

Step 3 – Go into your Themes folder and find single.php. Open the file and locate The following code:

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<?php the_title(); ?>

The above code displays the title of your blog post. If you want the social media icons to appear right above title, then copy the code below and place it before the title.

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<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "socialmedia", true)){ 
     if(function_exists('selfserv_sexy')) { selfserv_sexy(); }
} ?>

If you want the plugin to display at the bottom of your post, then paste the above code right after:

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<?php the_content(); ?>

Step 4 – In the Admin panel, open up one of your posts or create a new one. Scroll down to the Custom Fields section, click Enter New, name it socialmedia and give it a value of 1 or yes or whatever value you prefer, it really doesn’t matter as long as you input a value in there. Click the Add Custom field button to save it. You should now see a custom field called social media with a value of 1 or whatever value you chose.

From now on whenever you want to display your social media icons, simply scroll down to the Custom Fields section, click on the name drop-down, select socialmedia and give it any value.