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.
- 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]
Popularity: 1% [?]
IndiaPoint adds this Comment:
Is the bit.ly thing changeable with something else like tr.im etc?
I have been using your mobile plugin for long (on my other site) – and thats great!
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:42 am
John (Human3rror) adds this Comment:
awesome. great stuff!
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:02 am
Alex adds this Comment:
@IndiaPoint – the point here is that you can create an integration with whatever you like.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:53 am
Adam Dempsey adds this Comment:
Does the plugin support posting to Twitter when a post is updated?
eg Updated Blog Post: New Twitter Tools Features
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Twitter Tools goes to great lengths not to do this by default, but now you can create a plugin to tweet on updated posts if you want.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Daily Digest for June 22nd | Digital Gilbert adds this Pingback:
[...] New Twitter Tools Features – Testers Requested | alexking.org [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:14 pm
slee adds this Comment:
would be great if the tweets that are show on your wordpress blog could be filtered in some way like the # for example or possibly user defined
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:19 am
Alex adds this Comment:
That’s a perfect example of what someone can now build as a plugin for Twitter Tools.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Bert Mahoney adds this Comment:
looks like this plugin does not work with 2.8
Makes 1/2 the dashboard disappear.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Vince adds this Comment:
Hi Alex,
Great to see this development.
Will it work with WPMU?
And can it Tweet syndicated RSS posts?
Many thanks
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Merrill Guice adds this Comment:
Using WP 2.8, self hosted at midphase
Installed all plugins on site – no problems. Everything appears nice in Twitter Tools Options.
Click on one catagory to exclude from outbound posting and set up normally.
When save I get a fsockopen error across the bottom of the Twitter Tools Screen. Researched in wordpress.org support forums and found one or two mentions of people using Twitter-Tools with same issue but no resolutions posted. Full error message listed below.
Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/theggui2/public_html/thedailyegg.net/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Mathew adds this Comment:
Well done on the plugin – it has some great features that I think I’ll make some very good use out of.
Also appreciate that your plugin picks up the links for the @ replies and # hashtag searches. Such a simple feature and yet oh so very good!
One thing I’d like to see is the suppression of certain hashtags from the Twitter Tool feed widget. For instance, having a bunch of #followfridays appear in my Twitter Tools feed just looks untidy – it would be great to exlude any Tweet with the #followfriday tags, etc. Just something to consider in upcoming upgrades
Keep up the awesome work!
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Please see my comment above:
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Fabio N Sarmento adds this Comment:
Exclude script works!!!! NICEEE
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Tarique Sani adds this Comment:
Hey Alex – will there be an option that will allow me to put a after N number of tweets in the digests?
Or is there a hook that would allow writing a plugin for the same?
July 6th, 2009 at 12:36 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Yep, there’s a hook in place that should allow a plugin to do that. Try it and let me know if you need something else.
July 6th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Tarique Sani adds this Comment:
Thanks – I was able to code a plugin which will add a more tag after user specified number of tweets.
What I would like to know is how to force a digest post or a call to do_digest_post() which will create a digest post to test the working of plugin
July 6th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Tarique Sani adds this Comment:
oh well!
I managed to figure out how to force a digest post and test that my plugin was indeed adding the more tag properly after the set number of tweets, however all that work has been in vain because on line 788 of twitter-tools.php you use the wp_specialchars() on the tweet text which renders the more tag useless. Pretty disappointing as this was just my second run in with wordpress prlugins
I would like to know – isn’t the use of wp_specialchars here needless? Twitter text *is* already sanitized
July 8th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Alex adds this Comment:
These new filters should give you the late access you need. For example, you could put a placeholder token in using the filter on the posts for the digest, then replace that late just before the post is inserted. Or you can change the tweet output format now.
Enjoy.
http://plugins.trac.[...]er-tools.php
July 9th, 2009 at 6:21 am
Tarique Sani adds this Comment:
Alex!! that is great – thanks for the changes – looks like this is exactly what I needed. Will post here once the plugin is done.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Ian adds this Comment:
Hey Alex,
been using this plugin for a long time, on multiple sites, and I love it.
I’m using the widget to show my tweets in the sidebar, is there a way to style the text of my tweets using css? I’d like the text of the tweet to be one color, and the time it was posted (ex: 3 Hours Ago) to be another.
Can’t find a way to do this.
Thanks!
July 15th, 2009 at 9:08 am
SolarMagic: “How does it work?” | GUNTHER Portfolio adds this Pingback:
[...] post from Twitter Tools and an errant FeedBurner email of a three week old post. At least a new Twitter Tools plugin is in [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 10:03 pm