I’ve made good progress on my Twitter Tools plugin, enough that I’m putting it out there as a beta release so people can play with it.
Here is a progress report from the roadmap I posted:
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.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.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 add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.
Basically, I’ve just got the digest posting to finish up1. The digest posting is tricky. Because I need to use the psuedo-cron functionality in WordPress 2.1, I can’t be sure that the digest post will be fired off on a daily basis - it might be hours or even days late for very low traffic sites. Because of this, I need to do some sort of date mojo, storing the last date that the digest was posted and moving forward one day at a time, creating digests as I go. It will be some work.
Anyway, besides that it is fairly complete at this point so be sure to let me know if things don’t work as expected.
The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.
If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.
UPDATE: About 10 minutes after posting this I noticed that there was a closing div tag missing in the initial beta package. It was fixed about 2 minutes later.
Known Issues in 1.0b1:
- First see the Known Issues section of the README.
- The WPCron stuff doesn’t work so Tweets are not updated automatically. Using the “update tweets” button on the options screen works just fine.
- Something is weird with the “relative date” function. It works fine on my local box, but on my server it acts funny. Others are reporting similar weirdness.
- I also need to set it up so that it only returns a “tweet posted” message if Twitter returns a 200 status header. [back]
Popularity: 23% [?]
Patrick Havens adds this Comment:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems similar to asides?
March 12th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Bill adds this Comment:
You’re wrong.
March 12th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
chris messina adds this Comment:
Awesome! Can’t wait to try this!
March 12th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Conor O'Neill adds this Comment:
This looks great Alex. I’ve enabled it on my blog.
Two glitches so far: Posting from the sidebar widget is not working for me (I did set password in options) and everything is saying “3 weeks ago”.
Really looking forward to the daily digest!
March 12th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Please use the WP forums for support issues…
March 12th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Nick Starr adds this Comment:
Sorry about that Alex. Looks great. I can’t wait for the daily digest. Keep up the great work.
March 12th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
A.M. Griffin adds this Comment:
I appreciate you putting the work into this Alex. Nicely done. I’ll give it a go now.
Just started to use Twitter myslef and still not sure of its value to me but like many things you’ve got to remember to use it, create the value. This plugin might help on that front. Again, thanks.
March 12th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Paul Stamatiou adds this Comment:
Nice, I’ll test this out. Up until now, the way I’ve been doing it was via WP’s magpie RSS and as such it only got updated hourly. =/
March 13th, 2007 at 1:35 am
twitter guy adds this Comment:
I am testing it today. Don’t forget to check out: twitterami
Find local twitters here: http://www.twitterami.com
It’s not perfect but it’s the best I could do in 8 hours!
March 13th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Dean adds this Comment:
Top work Alex! Covers just about everything you could possibly want to do with Twitter.
I had a play with it today on one of my test blogs and its pretty neat.
Kind of makes my plugin feel very small and simple, but I guess I’m aiming at a different type of Twitter user.
March 13th, 2007 at 6:34 am
John Wiseman adds this Comment:
Great plugin! However, my latest Tweets are showing as “posted 3 weeks ago” when they were just posted minutes ago.. Perhaps a bug? Take a look here.. http://www.johnwiseman.ca/blogging/
March 13th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Please read the “Known Issues in 1.0b1″ (in bold) in the post.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:06 am
tyler adds this Comment:
Nice Alex! Sounds packed full of features. Can’t wait to try it out.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:42 am
John Ford adds this Comment:
Alex, thanks for the great plugin. FYI, I sent you a message from your Contact page with a list of bug fixes I made to the Twitter Tools Plugin. I’d love to send you the file and talk about the changes. Just wanted to make sure you got it and it didn’t go into your spam filter or get pushed aside.
Thanks.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Steve Kirks adds this Comment:
Alex:
Installed and working great. I suggest you add a line in the readme that says to manually update after you finish the config. When I added the widget to my sidebar, the lack of content screwed up the layout but a manual fetch of Tweets fixed it right up.
Thanks for your hard work on this. I’m donating some PayPal cash right now…
March 18th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Steve, get latest from the SVN repo; that issue has been fixed for a while now. New release will happen soon.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Twitter Community adds this Comment:
Ping from the Twitter Community and Forums. We listed your twitter tools on our Twitter Forge.
http://www.twittown.com
April 25th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Alan adds this Comment:
The best! Paypall has been pinged.
Feature request: I’d prefer a post not be reposted to Twitter if I go back and edit to fix a typo or minor change. Can it tweet only if it is the first publish?
May 30th, 2007 at 11:13 am
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