- Is aerni/social-links a Laravel package or a Statamic addon?
- It is a Statamic addon that generates social media share links plus contact links such as mailto and tel. Because Statamic runs on Laravel, it lives inside a Laravel application, but it is not a standalone Laravel package you can drop into a plain Laravel API or headless backend. If your project is not built on Statamic, a small internal helper is usually the better fit.
- How do I install aerni/social-links and what are its requirements?
- Install it with composer require aerni/social-links and confirm that Statamic discovers and registers the addon. The provided overview does not list explicit Statamic, PHP, or Laravel version constraints, so check the package's composer.json and release notes before installing. Pin those versions in your own constraints and validate on a feature branch before rolling out.
- Which social media platforms does aerni/social-links support?
- The package is described as covering Facebook, X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more, along with mailto, tel, and profile links. The exact channel list should be confirmed in the README and source before you rely on it. Social platforms change their share endpoints over time, so compare generated URLs against each platform's current share specification.
- Can I use aerni/social-links in a plain Laravel app without Statamic?
- No. It is a Statamic addon that depends on Statamic's addon registration and template layer, so architectural fit is poor for a plain Laravel API or a non-Statamic CMS. For those stacks, a short internal share-link helper is cheaper, safer, and easier to test than adding a Statamic-specific dependency. Adopt the addon only when your templates render through Antlers or Statamic's view layer.
- How do I generate a share link with aerni/social-links in a Statamic template?
- Usage is template-level: you generate outbound share URLs rather than storing content, so no data migration is involved. Confirm whether the addon exposes Antlers tags, configuration, or a fieldtype before designing your templates. A good sequencing is to install it, wire it into one template behind a feature flag, and compare the output against each platform's share spec.
- Does aerni/social-links correctly encode URLs, titles, and special characters?
- Encoding is the highest-risk area for any share-link generator, particularly with long URLs, multilingual titles, and existing query strings. The addon builds URLs for you, but you should still test with encoded characters and non-Latin text in staging. Snapshot tests that assert the exact generated URL are a cheap safeguard against silent breakage.
- Does aerni/social-links support UTM parameters and canonical URLs?
- UTM and canonical URL handling is not documented in the overview, so treat it as unverified. You can usually append UTM parameters to the URL you pass in, but confirm the addon does not strip or re-encode your query string. If share-click analytics are important, test this explicitly or wrap the output in your own helper.
- How should I test the share links generated by aerni/social-links?
- Write feature or snapshot tests asserting the exact generated URLs for representative content, including long titles, encoded characters, and multilingual strings. Run a time-boxed spike against the target platforms in staging before a broad template rollout. Test coverage inside the package is unclear from the overview, so your own assertions carry the weight.
- Is aerni/social-links actively maintained and safe for production?
- Adoption signals are low, with roughly 6 GitHub stars, 0 dependents, and a small code surface, and the listed release date of 2026-03-26 should be verified. The MIT license lowers lock-in risk because you can fork or vendor the code if maintenance stalls. Treat it as a tactical utility rather than a platform-critical dependency, and keep an eye on repository activity.
- What are the alternatives to aerni/social-links for generating share links?
- For a plain Laravel app, a small internal helper that builds share URLs with rawurlencode is usually the simplest and most testable option. On Statamic, a custom Antlers tag or a Blade partial can do the same job without an extra dependency. The addon mainly saves you from writing and maintaining the per-platform URL formats yourself.