Twitter Tools 2.0

I’m very pleased to announce that Twitter Tools 2.0 is now available!

Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates a complete, two-way integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Version 2.0 of Twitter Tools makes the plugin extensible in the same way WordPress itself is. I’ve added hooks and filters that allow other plugins to be created for Twitter Tools and extend/change/customize the way Twitter Tools works.

I get a lot of requests for features/changes that are specific to someone’s particular needs. Unfortunately I can’t build specific features for each user into the general plugin, but now other people can build plugins for it to make things work just as they want it to.

To make sure these hooks and filters work properly, I 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.
  • Exclude Category for Twitter Tools – enables not tweeting posts in chosen categories.

Each of these plugins can to be activated individually from your Plugins page, and adds their configuration options to the Twitter Tools settings page. These should be great examples for anyone wanting to build a plugin for Twitter Tools.

Here are some ideas for other Twitter Tools plugins that I’ve seen requests for:

  • Add tracking tokens to the end of blog post URLs that are sent to Twitter – this is all customizable with filters now, so it should be pretty easy.
  • Support for yfrog, twitpic, etc. in the Twitter widget display – you can customize the output of the tweet to include an image if you find one present.
  • Add hashtags to your blog post tweet using the WordPress tags associated with the post.
  • Make links in Tweets open in a new window/tab.
  • Only Tweet blog posts in a certain category.
  • Ability to customize/add text to the blog post Tweet.
  • Use http://example.com?p=123 style URLs for blog post permalinks.
  • Changing how much of the tweet text is used for the post title (or changing it to something else entirely).
  • Etc.

Hopefully we’ll see lots of interesting Twitter Tools plugins from folks who have been requesting these features. I’m very interested to see what people build.

I’ve also added some additional CSS classes to the tweet output and a commonly requested feature to customize the tweet prefix for new blog post notifications. I had resisted this in the past due to some edge cases that could cause problems, but I believe only a rare situation (annoyance, not fatal) is possible and I doubt folks will run into it – sounds like famous last words, right? 🙂

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please contact the WordPress HelpCenter (512-788-9236) or you can try the WP Support Forums.

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