Minor issue with Social Connected in Sitecore 8.1: Control failing due to an image

This will be the first of many that focus on various issues/stumbling blocks I encountered along the upgrade path to 8.1. The first one is with the Social Connected module. This looked so easy to setup (and it is), but I ran into an issue using the MVC version of the Social Sign in. The control would always throw an exception: Value cannot be null or empty. Kind of generic, but once I dug into it I found the root cause of the issue. The MVC rendering uses set GUIDs for the various social icons. These are stored in /sitecore/media library/Images/Social. For most people, this will not present a problem but I inherited an Intranet site which assumed it would be the only site within Sitecore, so it kind of hijacked these folders for itself. Well over time, I've launched an additional 5 websites within the solution. The media library and various content areas have restrictions to ensure that Intranet data is never exposed to any of the Internet data. This means 2 publishing databases: Intranet and Internet. The Social images were stored in a path that was only accessible to the Intranet so these images were missing in the CD environment. Once I resolved the publishing issue, the Social Connected module worked as expected and was really easy to get started.

Take away: make sure /sitecore/media library/Images/Social is accessible to the CD environment where Social Connected will be used.