Should I add sharing buttons using a plugin or directly in my theme files?

This question relates to plugins for Linkedin Share buttons, Twitter Tweet buttons, and Facebook Like buttons.

These are for blog posts on a WordPress blog which is at a subdomain of a site that is built in CakePHP.

Considering the possibility that plugins can become outdated, and that if this happens there is a possibility of losing the counts of shares / tweets / likes, I’m wondering if it’s better to add in these sharing buttons manually into the single.php theme file.

Is it better to use plugins to add in these buttons, or to add the buttons manually into the single.php theme file?

Using a plugin is always a quick and easy thing to do, until it goes wrong. I am a fan of less plugins (unless you really need them) and more hard-code reason is that you then have full control of what goes into your project.

And at the comment on “plugins can become outdated and that…” i think you answered your own question with that one line 🙂

Write more, worry about less -> thats my motto 😀