Many thanks to everyone who stopped by and shared an opinion on how they think a Twitter integration WordPress plugin should work.
I’ve started coding on the project and here are some of the decisions I’ve made and features it will have:
- Tweets will be stored in a separate table because this gives us the most flexibility to work with them.
- Tweets will be downloaded from Twitter once an hour (might change this to 30 minutes) using the psuedo-cron functionality in WordPress 2.1.
- Because of the above, the plugin will only support WordPress 2.1 (at least initially).
- There is the ability to manually refresh your tweets.
- There will be an option to create individual blog posts from new tweets.
- There will be an option to create a daily digest blog post from new tweets.
- There will be an option to set the category for these blog posts.
- There will be an option to create a tweet in Twitter whenever you add a new post to your blog (obviously we’ll need to exclude tweet generated posts).
- There will be a “post to Twitter” form added in the WP admin area.
- All of the “post to Twitter” functionality will require you to put your Twitter password into the plugin so the posting can work. The Twitter API uses 401 authentication.
- There will be a sidebar widget to show your latest tweets - possibly a full view of the latest tweet and a list view of the last 5.
- I might use some kind of AJAX display to hide/show full tweets in the sidebar widget.
- I might add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.
- Right now only one Twitter account is supported per WP install (not one per author).
- Your host must have PHP’s fopen functions enabled for any of this stuff to work.
I think this covers most of the usage scenarios folks are asking for. Feel free to ask for additional features in the comments.
If you’re curious, you can take a look at the public SVN repository. There is an initial code checkin there, but it isn’t in a usable state yet. I’ll let you know when it’s ready for testing.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Dan adds this Comment:
But what about the kitchen sink?
March 8th, 2007 at 12:11 am
David adds this Comment:
This looks incredible, Alex!
When tweeting on a new blog post, would it be possible to make that tweet link back to the post in question? A cursory look on my part tells me “no”, but if you see a way, I think it would be a great addition to Twitter Tools.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Alex adds this Comment:
If you’re talking about this:
the tweet will include a link to the blog post.
If you were talking about something else, please clarify.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:23 am
David adds this Comment:
And right after I commented, I noticed you had added a link in your latest tweet. I guess that answers part of my question…
March 8th, 2007 at 12:24 am
Dean adds this Comment:
This plugin sounds like its going to be pretty cool once its finished.
“I might add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.”
I acutally started modifying/combining a couple of existing plugins and adding an ajax style update to be used in a similar way to what you have described. The idea is too create something like the way you can update you’re status on Facebook.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Tyler adds this Comment:
Alex, this is really a great idea! Can’t wait to test it.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:32 am
Darren adds this Comment:
Alex, will this be something offered “free” (in quotes because this is one plugin I’d be quite happy to donate to :))
March 8th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Mark Krynsky adds this Comment:
I’m very excited about this plugin. Can’t wait to replace my widget which seems a bit out of place with the sidebar functionality. Keep up the great work Alex.
March 8th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Paul Stamatiou adds this Comment:
Dave Kellam has a twitterRSS plugin for WordPress released although the current version is rather basic.
March 8th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Chris adds this Comment:
I’ve been wondering how to integrate Twitter into a website, whether that site was using WordPress or not. Okay, that’s easy.
As I run a couple of websites I would like to be able to use Twitter to make short entries on different sites using one Twitter account (ie - one mobile phone, one dashboard widget, one AIM account…).
I had thought of tinkering with the RSS feed to separate different ‘Twitterings’ for the different sites using short prefixes in each Twitter message to distinguish each website.
So far this has just been an idea, quite an easy one to implement I’d say. Having read this article I thought I would share this idea with you to perhaps consider during developing this plugin.
Basically a way to post messages on different websites using just one Twitter account.
March 9th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
AndyCast Andy adds this Comment:
How about a on the fly character counter counting down from 140, please.
March 9th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Dean adds this Comment:
Just downloaded Twitter Tools from svn, its looking pretty good. I haven’t tested it out ( yet ), but looking through the code it looks very interesting.
March 11th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
andre adds this Comment:
Another feature you might consider adding is updating the status on Facebook.com at the same time that twitter is updated.
March 12th, 2007 at 12:24 am
Twitter Tools 1.0b1 | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[…] Here is a progress report from the roadmap I posted: […]
April 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
programmazione » Blog Archive » Twitter plugins per wordpress adds this Pingback:
[…] Chi mi segue su twitter si ricorderà che mesi fa avevo annunciato che avrei iniziato a lavorare ad un plugin per wordpress. Come al solito la strategia PUP ha funzionato e quindi ecco che il plugin è magicamente comparso sul blog di Alex King. […]
April 26th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Twitter on the New York Times at The Blog Herald adds this Pingback:
[…] than actually doing work). Last time I tried installing add-ons to my personal blog, I tried the Twitter Tools plugin by alexking. This let me automatically publish a daily summary of tweets, a decision I have since […]
April 26th, 2007 at 5:53 am
Rigi adds this Comment:
What I’d love to see on the AJAX front would be a tweet browser int he sidebar. Simple “previous” and “next” buttons that would replace the current tweet with the previous/next without reloading the page.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:50 am