Twitter Tools 1.6

Yay, Twitter Tools has reached version 1.6!

Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that allows you to do a two-way integration between your WordPress powered blog and Twitter. It has the following features:

  • Download and archive your tweets from Twitter.
  • Show your recent tweets in a sidebar widget.
  • Create a blog post from each of your tweets (you can set the category, author, tags, etc.).
  • Create a daily digest from your tweets.
  • Create a weekly digest from your tweets.
  • Create a tweet on Twitter when you post to your blog (optional on a per-post basis).
  • Create tweets on Twitter from your blog sidebar and/or admin interface.
  • Auto-link @replies and provide “in reply to” links.
  • Auto-link hashtags.
  • Ability to exclude @replies from sidebars, blog posts and digests.
  • Supports URL shortening services via standard WordPress filter (read the README).
  • Supports WP Chunk for URL shortening URLs in tweets when they are shown in your blog posts and/or sidebar.
  • Thorough README with answers to frequently asked questions.

Here are notable changes from the 1.5.x releases:

  1. Fixed the issue where posts via XML-RPC/AtomPub or scheduled posts would not get tweeted – these now use your default settings.
  2. Fixed issue where the per-post “send to Twitter” setting for future post was not honored properly.
  3. Fixed issues with digests – both daily and weekly should be working correctly now1 The digest features are no longer listed as experimental.
  4. Changed the code that checks to create the Twitter data table so that it works properly with the new bulk plugin activation features.
  5. Added a new filter tweet_blog_post_url so that other plugins can hook in and run the URL of your blog post through an URL shortening service of your choosing before sending the full URL to Twitter (Twitter uses TinyURL by default).
  6. Fixed an issue that caused the ‘Test Login’ functionality to report a failure with a correct username and password (though the regular functionality was unaffected).
  7. Changed how “replies” are determined. no longer using Twitter’s definition as many Twitter users thought differently and considered this a bug.
  8. Allow anyone with “publish_posts” ability to post to Twitter from the admin area.
  9. Fixed several auto-linking edge cases.
  10. Bunch of little/under the hood stuff.

I’m pleased to finally get these changes out. I know the 1.5.x versions lingered too long with some unfixed bugs. This plugin has gotten complex enough that the bugs are not always readily apparent.1 Crowd Favorite has been (thankfully) keeping busy so we haven’t had the time to try to address these until recently. We had to spend quite a bit of time to track down some of these issues – hopefully they are all properly addressed now.2

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 e-mail me a link to the thread.

  1. My call for help a while back didn’t bring solutions – unfortunately. [back]
  2. This plugin is already pretty complicated, making it hard to test thoroughly. Another reason I’m hesitant to add additional features to it. [back]

This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.