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.