Addthis: Changing Description, Title, and Url being sent

Question

I am building a forum in PHP and I want users to be able to share the title and description of each post to facebook, twitter, ...etc using the Addthis social plugin. Here is the code Addthis has given me:

    <!-- AddThis Button BEGIN -->
    <div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style "
        addthis:url="www.example.com"
        addthis:title="Example Title"
        addthis:description="Example Description">
    <a class="addthis_button_preferred_1"></a>
    <a class="addthis_button_preferred_2"></a>
    <a class="addthis_button_preferred_3"></a>
    <a class="addthis_button_preferred_4"></a>
    <a class="addthis_button_compact"></a>
    <a class="addthis_counter addthis_bubble_style"></a>
    </div>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s6.addthis.com/js/154/addthis_widget.js#pubid=rd-39e8r89e9er8er989"></script>
    <!-- AddThis Button END -->

I was able to change the url to another I have specified, but changing the title and description has no effect. In fact, they do not even show up when I click the share button and post it to my facebook wall. What is the proper way to get this to work?

Answer 1

AddThis doesn't officially support all these parameters as far as I can tell (I can't find them all in once place in their documentation), so ideally you should just use OpenGraph tags on the page you are on. But in any case...

You need to specify it on the custom buttons themselves, not on the toolbox. You can even specify the image. If your buttons have to come from AddThis instead of specifying them yourself, I'm not sure.

<div class="addthis_sharing_toolbox">
    <a class="addthis_button_facebook"
        addthis:url="http://google.com/"
        addthis:title="Here's a title"   
        addthis:media="http://images.google.com/example.png" 
        addthis:description="Here's a cool description">
        <i class="ico ico-facebook"></i>
    </a>

    <a class="addthis_button_twitter"
        addthis:url="http://google.com/"
        addthis:title="Here's a title"   
        addthis:media="http://images.google.com/example.png" 
        addthis:description="Here's a cool description">
        <i class="ico ico-twitter"></i>
    </a>

    <a class="addthis_button_linkedin"
        addthis:url="http://google.com/"
        addthis:title="Here's a title"   
        addthis:media="http://images.google.com/example.png" 
        addthis:description="Here's a cool description">
        <i class="ico ico-facebook"></i>
    </a>
</div>

AddThis's documentation sucks so I just happened to run into the right things and figure this out. Enjoy!