I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for quite a while to offer readers a quick and easy way to share what I’ve written on different social networks. It’s fairly configurable, allowing you to select where you want to make it easy for people to share things with. I have about half a dozen little icons at the bottom of each post that you can click to share the entry with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or by email, or add it to your favourites, share it in Google Reader or post it to Digg or Reddit. There are other social networks that I could choose, like MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?), but I don’t want to clutter things up with a zillion little icons.

There was a major upgrade that appeared in my WordPress control panel today bringing it up to version 4.0.3, from 3.whatever. Usually WordPress plugin updates are fairly painless, so clicking on it didn’t really concern me, so I upgraded and then watched as all my icons disappeared.

Grr.

Poking around in the settings screen for the plugin, I noticed that some of the options, such as choosing which social networks you wanted, seemed to be missing. Figuring that the install had somehow failed in a manner that WordPress couldn’t detect, I was all set to uninstall it when I decided to try poking the grey “reset Sociable” button hiding at the bottom (which I initially thought was unavailable because it was grey). Lo and behold, the things that were missing suddenly appeared and when I visited a blog entry all of the icons were back. I had to reselect the social networks I wanted, which was a bit annoying, but other than that everything seems to be working.

So, if you’ve upgraded the Sociable plugin and encountered this, try poking the “reset Sociable” button because that will probably fix things.

Now, if only the author would add support for the Google +1 button.

Update: Shortly after I posted this, the plugin’s author told me on Twitter that they’re looking at adding counters so you can see how many times someone shares something and also support for Google +1. You can follow them at @Sociablesite.