I’ve made some changes to my Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress – hopefully that will enable some pretty cool stuff in the future.

I get a lot of requests for features/changes that are specific to someone’s needs. Since (unfortunately) I can’t build specific features for each user into the general plugin, I’ve done the next best thing – I’ve added hooks and filters so that other folks can write plugins for Twitter Tools just like they can for WordPress.

To make sure these hooks and filters work properly, I’ve created three plugins for Twitter Tools that provide commonly requested features:

• Bit.ly for Twitter Tools – enables shortening your URLs with Bit.ly and tracking them on your Bit.ly account.
• #hashtags for Twitter Tools – enables adding hashtags to your blog post tweets.¹
• Exclude Category for Twitter Tools – enables not tweeting posts in chosen categories.

Each of these plugins needs to be activated individually from your Plugins page, and adds their configuration options to the Twitter Tools settings page. You can grab the latest development version of Twitter Tools and these additional plugins from the official SVN repository:

http://svn.wp-plugins.org/twitter-tools/trunk/

I’ve been working on these and doing a bunch of testing this weekend, but I’d love to get some additional testing and feedback on these before I do an official release. Let me know how they work for you – and think about some plugins of your own to write.

1. This uses a fairly complex method of trimming the title as needed to make room for the hashtags – patches to improve/simplify that system while maintaining the functionality are very welcome. [back]

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