I’ve made good progress on my Twitter Tools plugin, enough that I’m putting it out there as a beta release so people can play with it.

Here is a progress report from the roadmap I posted:

• 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.
• 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 Twitterâ€? form added in the WP admin area.
• 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 add the ability to post to Twitter from the sidebar widget as well, if you are logged in as an admin.

Basically, I’ve just got the digest posting to finish up¹. The digest posting is tricky. Because I need to use the psuedo-cron functionality in WordPress 2.1, I can’t be sure that the digest post will be fired off on a daily basis – it might be hours or even days late for very low traffic sites. Because of this, I need to do some sort of date mojo, storing the last date that the digest was posted and moving forward one day at a time, creating digests as I go. It will be some work.

Anyway, besides that it is fairly complete at this point so be sure to let me know if things don’t work as expected.

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

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

UPDATE: About 10 minutes after posting this I noticed that there was a closing div tag missing in the initial beta package. It was fixed about 2 minutes later.

Known Issues in 1.0b1:

• First see the Known Issues section of the README.
• The WPCron stuff doesn’t work so Tweets are not updated automatically. Using the “update tweets” button on the options screen works just fine.
• Something is weird with the “relative date” function. It works fine on my local box, but on my server it acts funny. Others are reporting similar weirdness.

1. I also need to set it up so that it only returns a “tweet posted” message if Twitter returns a 200 status header. [back]

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