Adding Facebook & Twitter Links to the OPAC

by Nicole C. on Dec 12, 2011

A while back I did a tutorial video on how to add Facebook links to the My Summary page in your Koha OPAC. We’ve had a few questions recently about this so I thought I should give you a written summary (so you can copy and paste from it) and tips for adding Twitter as well.

The first thing you need to do is decide what widgets or buttons you want to use. There are many options out there, so I’m just going to use the official widgets.

For Facebook you can go to their Like Button page to get the code you need. Most of the choices they give you are up to you to decide, but the URL should be something like this:

http://MYCATALOGURL/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber={BIBLIONUMBER}

Replace ‘MYCATALOGURL’ in the link above with your OPAC URL and that should allow you to generate a unique link for whatever title your patron is sharing on Facebook.

Once you’re made all of your choices you can click the ‘Get Code’ button and copy the code from Facebook over to your Koha OPACMySummaryHTML system preference.

All of the above steps are showing the tutorial video if you’d like to watch them.

As for Twitter, they too have a handy little tool you can use to generate the code you’ll need for your button. Visit the tool and choose what button you’d like to create. Next you’ll need to answer the questions. For the Share URL you’re going to want to enter the same URL we used for Facebook:

http://MYCATALOGURL/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber={BIBLIONUMBER}

Where you replace ‘MYCATALOGURL’ in the link above with your OPAC URL. When you’ve chosen all of your settings you can copy the code from the box on the right and paste it in to the OPACMySummaryHTML preference in Koha.

It’s that easy! All you need know is a little design tip to make it look clean. Make sure that you put a couple of spaces (&nbsp;) or a new line (<br />) in between the two buttons so that they don’t end up looking to close to each other.