Many thanks to everyone who stopped by and shared an opinion on how they think a Twitter integration WordPress plugin should work.
I’ve started coding on the project and here are some of the decisions I’ve made and features it will have:
- 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.
- Because of the above, the plugin will only support WordPress 2.1 (at least initially).
- 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.
- All of the “post to Twitter” functionality will require you to put your Twitter password into the plugin so the posting can work. The Twitter API uses 401 authentication.
- 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 use some kind of AJAX display to hide/show full tweets in the sidebar widget.
- I might add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.
- Right now only one Twitter account is supported per WP install (not one per author).
- Your host must have PHP’s fopen functions enabled for any of this stuff to work.
I think this covers most of the usage scenarios folks are asking for. Feel free to ask for additional features in the comments.
If you’re curious, you can take a look at the public SVN repository. There is an initial code checkin there, but it isn’t in a usable state yet. I’ll let you know when it’s ready for testing.
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
But what about the kitchen sink?
This looks incredible, Alex!
When tweeting on a new blog post, would it be possible to make that tweet link back to the post in question? A cursory look on my part tells me “no”, but if you see a way, I think it would be a great addition to Twitter Tools.
If you’re talking about this:
the tweet will include a link to the blog post.
If you were talking about something else, please clarify. 🙂
And right after I commented, I noticed you had added a link in your latest tweet. I guess that answers part of my question… 🙂
This plugin sounds like its going to be pretty cool once its finished.
“I might add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.”
I acutally started modifying/combining a couple of existing plugins and adding an ajax style update to be used in a similar way to what you have described. The idea is too create something like the way you can update you’re status on Facebook.
Alex, this is really a great idea! Can’t wait to test it. 🙂
Alex, will this be something offered “free” (in quotes because this is one plugin I’d be quite happy to donate to :))
I’m very excited about this plugin. Can’t wait to replace my widget which seems a bit out of place with the sidebar functionality. Keep up the great work Alex.
Dave Kellam has a twitterRSS plugin for WordPress released although the current version is rather basic.
I’ve been wondering how to integrate Twitter into a website, whether that site was using WordPress or not. Okay, that’s easy.
As I run a couple of websites I would like to be able to use Twitter to make short entries on different sites using one Twitter account (ie – one mobile phone, one dashboard widget, one AIM account…).
I had thought of tinkering with the RSS feed to separate different ‘Twitterings’ for the different sites using short prefixes in each Twitter message to distinguish each website.
So far this has just been an idea, quite an easy one to implement I’d say. Having read this article I thought I would share this idea with you to perhaps consider during developing this plugin.
Basically a way to post messages on different websites using just one Twitter account.
How about a on the fly character counter counting down from 140, please.
Just downloaded Twitter Tools from svn, its looking pretty good. I haven’t tested it out ( yet ), but looking through the code it looks very interesting.
Another feature you might consider adding is updating the status on Facebook.com at the same time that twitter is updated.
[…] Here is a progress report from the roadmap I posted: […]
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What I’d love to see on the AJAX front would be a tweet browser int he sidebar. Simple “previous” and “next” buttons that would replace the current tweet with the previous/next without reloading the page.
Love this plugin and hope to see it become even better 🙂
Would love to see option to automatically post the permalink back to the tweet along with the WP post, as well as info about/linkto the service the tweet was posted from (Ping.fm, Twitterific etc.). I have developed a strong principle of always linking back to the source, whatever I do, and as the info should be there, I imagine this is a small feature.
Now Twitter Tools strips the tweet of the username prefix, which is nice, but the username could also be a good place to put the permalink back to the tweet on Twitter, say Username: [tweet-content]
I really like that TT uses the accurate time posting of tweets, that it strips too long titles and adds the […], and that the text is retained as text in the blog post. I use another plugin which automatically transforms raw URL’s in WP to working links, so I like that the complete tweet is not made a hyperlink back to the source.
Another neat feature would be to automatically transform @username’s into working links which point to their respective user pages on Twitter.
Keep up the good work! 🙂
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