Social Sharing Image Generation Requirements

Project Pages PRO requires one of two PHP libraries to generate Social Share images.

• ImageMagick (works best, images come out cleanest)
• GD Image (Experimental support, works well in most cases)

… Most shared hosts will have one of these available, but ideally you’d have the PHP extension for ImageMagick installed.

You can usually find out if your host/server has one of these installed by googling “does {your hosting company} have ImageMagick PHP Extension”.

For now best results are achieved with ImageMagick, but I’ve included experimental support for GD Image. Important: If you’ve turned on Social Share image generation and you’re noticing any unusual behaviour when loading project pages, (e.g. page slowdowns), please disable the setting and email me to let me know.

Enabling/Disabling Social Share Image Generation

You can enable/disable this feature by visiting the Project Pages Settings page (“Project Pages” -> “Settings” from your WP Admin menu) and then changing the ‘Share Image Mode’ setting.

As you can see below you have three options:

• Do not add OG Meta (Share) Tags
• Use Featured Images
• Generate Cool OG Meta Images

… the latter of these options enables Social Share Image generation, if you’re having any issues with this feature, or don’t want it enabled, I recommend using “Use Featured Images”.

The “Do not add OG Meta (Share) tags” option is only really productive if you have an SEO plugin which is already doing this better than Project Pages does.

Any issues, please get in touch.

The post Project Pages Pro requires ImageMagick first appeared on Project Pages.

Note: Currently if your hosting doesn’t have the Imagemagick extension installed this feature will fallback to the EXPERIMETNAL Gd Image library, which might cause timeouts and produces slightly less perfect images. I’m working on a workaround, but you’ve been warned.

Choosing a background

You can choose which background you want your Project Pages to use to generate the sharing images by going to “Project Pages -> Settings” and scrolling down to “PRO settings”:

… here you can select whether to use these automatically generated meta images, or your Project Page featured images. After that you can choose a background via the “Share Image Background” setting.

After you change this and save the settings, refresh the page and go back to the section to see an example.

You can view examples of the different background options below.

Background options (Examples)

Abstract

Abstract 2

Abstract 3

Abstract 4

Abstract 5

Abstract Sun

Art

Art 2

Cogs

Cogs 2

Cogs 3

Matrix

Matrix 2

Nature

Nature 2

Sky

Space

Space 2

Space 3

Theatre

Technology

Technology 2

Waves

Blue

Green

Pink

Terracotta

Tools

The post Generating Custom Social Sharing Images (OG Meta) with Project Pages Pro first appeared on Project Pages.