Share option for blogs plugin

[Andre601]

One feature you can often find in blogs is share buttons that allow you to share the article on social media.

Such an option for the blog plugin would be of great use, as it would allow readers to more easily share a blog post on social media with the least amount of steps required (depending on the social media platform).

Configuration example

plugins:
  - blog:
      # Other settings here
      share:
        - icon: 'simple/x'
          title: 'Tweet on X!' # Defaults to "Share post"
          link: 'https://x.com/?url={url}&text={title}' # Placeholders explained below
          class: 'md-button__social--x' # Adds the provided classes to `.md-button`
        - icon: 'simple/mastodon'
          title: 'Toot on Mastodon!'
          link: 'https://mastodonshare.com?url={url}&text={title}'
          class: 'md-button__social--mastodon'

Placeholders:
(Placeholder values used in link would be URL Encoded)

• {url} - Returns the URL to the blog post.
• {title} - Returns the title of the Blog post (prioritizing page.meta.title if set).
• {description} - Returns page.meta.description or post excerpt.
• {author_<value>} - Returns a matching <value> from the post author in the .authors.yml. In case of multiple authors would the first one be used (except {author_name} where a comma-separated list could be returned?)
• {tags} - Returns comma-separated list of tags for the post.
• {categories} Returns comma-separated list of categories for the post.

Result

The result would be buttons added to the bottom of the blog post, or at the bottom of the author sidebar with the icon displayed.

As an example, assume the post URL is https://blog.example.com/2025/01-01-lorem-ipsum and title is Lorem Ipsum.
With the above shown configuration would the following HTML be generated and used:

<a href="https://x.com/?url=https://blog.example.com/2025/01-01-lorem-ipsum&text=Lorem%20Ipsum" class="md-button md-button__social--x" title="Tweet on X!"><!-- SVG of the X Icon from Simple Icons --></a>
<a href="https://mastodonshare/?url=https://blog.example.com/2025/01-01-lorem-ipsum&text=Lorem%20Ipsum" class="md-button md-button__social--mastodon" title="Toot on Mastodon!"><!-- SVG of the Mastodon Icon from Simple Icons --></a>

Current alternatives

Extending the theme and manually adding those options, requiring extra maintenance for the user should the post template change. Also, the effective URL may not even be available nor may there be options to properly URL encode content.

[Andre601]

I for now manually made share buttons for my blog, which work but may not be for everyone.
I've explained the process here: https://andre601.ch/blog/2025/02-12-add-share-buttons/

How they look:

[Andre601]

I want to quickly mention that I've updated the guide to implement the buttons into the left sidebar of the blog post, which I would also recommend for the blog plugin to do, should this feature ever be considered to be implemented.