I’ve made some changes to my Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress – hopefully that will enable some pretty cool stuff in the future.
I get a lot of requests for features/changes that are specific to someone’s needs. Since (unfortunately) I can’t build specific features for each user into the general plugin, I’ve done the next best thing – I’ve added hooks and filters so that other folks can write plugins for Twitter Tools just like they can for WordPress.
To make sure these hooks and filters work properly, I’ve 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.1
- Exclude Category for Twitter Tools – enables not tweeting posts in chosen categories.
Each of these plugins needs to be activated individually from your Plugins page, and adds their configuration options to the Twitter Tools settings page. You can grab the latest development version of Twitter Tools and these additional plugins from the official SVN repository:
http://svn.wp-plugins.org/twitter-tools/trunk/
I’ve been working on these and doing a bunch of testing this weekend, but I’d love to get some additional testing and feedback on these before I do an official release. Let me know how they work for you – and think about some plugins of your own to write.
- This uses a fairly complex method of trimming the title as needed to make room for the hashtags – patches to improve/simplify that system while maintaining the functionality are very welcome. [back]
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Is the bit.ly thing changeable with something else like tr.im etc?
I have been using your mobile plugin for long (on my other site) – and thats great!
awesome. great stuff!
@IndiaPoint – the point here is that you can create an integration with whatever you like.
Does the plugin support posting to Twitter when a post is updated?
eg Updated Blog Post: New Twitter Tools Features
Twitter Tools goes to great lengths not to do this by default, but now you can create a plugin to tweet on updated posts if you want.
[…] New Twitter Tools Features – Testers Requested | alexking.org […]
would be great if the tweets that are show on your wordpress blog could be filtered in some way like the # for example or possibly user defined
That’s a perfect example of what someone can now build as a plugin for Twitter Tools.
looks like this plugin does not work with 2.8 🙁
Makes 1/2 the dashboard disappear.
Hi Alex,
Great to see this development.
Will it work with WPMU?
And can it Tweet syndicated RSS posts?
Many thanks
Using WP 2.8, self hosted at midphase
Installed all plugins on site – no problems. Everything appears nice in Twitter Tools Options.
Click on one catagory to exclude from outbound posting and set up normally.
When save I get a fsockopen error across the bottom of the Twitter Tools Screen. Researched in wordpress.org support forums and found one or two mentions of people using Twitter-Tools with same issue but no resolutions posted. Full error message listed below.
Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/theggui2/public_html/thedailyegg.net/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142
Well done on the plugin – it has some great features that I think I’ll make some very good use out of.
Also appreciate that your plugin picks up the links for the @ replies and # hashtag searches. Such a simple feature and yet oh so very good!
One thing I’d like to see is the suppression of certain hashtags from the Twitter Tool feed widget. For instance, having a bunch of #followfridays appear in my Twitter Tools feed just looks untidy – it would be great to exlude any Tweet with the #followfriday tags, etc. Just something to consider in upcoming upgrades 😉
Keep up the awesome work!
Please see my comment above:
🙂
Exclude script works!!!! NICEEE
Hey Alex – will there be an option that will allow me to put a after N number of tweets in the digests?
Or is there a hook that would allow writing a plugin for the same?
Yep, there’s a hook in place that should allow a plugin to do that. Try it and let me know if you need something else.
Thanks – I was able to code a plugin which will add a more tag after user specified number of tweets.
What I would like to know is how to force a digest post or a call to do_digest_post() which will create a digest post to test the working of plugin
oh well!
I managed to figure out how to force a digest post and test that my plugin was indeed adding the more tag properly after the set number of tweets, however all that work has been in vain because on line 788 of twitter-tools.php you use the wp_specialchars() on the tweet text which renders the more tag useless. Pretty disappointing as this was just my second run in with wordpress prlugins 🙁
I would like to know – isn’t the use of wp_specialchars here needless? Twitter text *is* already sanitized
These new filters should give you the late access you need. For example, you could put a placeholder token in using the filter on the posts for the digest, then replace that late just before the post is inserted. Or you can change the tweet output format now.
Enjoy.
http://plugins.trac.[...]er-tools.php
Alex!! that is great – thanks for the changes – looks like this is exactly what I needed. Will post here once the plugin is done.
Hey Alex,
been using this plugin for a long time, on multiple sites, and I love it.
I’m using the widget to show my tweets in the sidebar, is there a way to style the text of my tweets using css? I’d like the text of the tweet to be one color, and the time it was posted (ex: 3 Hours Ago) to be another.
Can’t find a way to do this.
Thanks!
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