Twitter Tools Roadmap

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.