I’m very pleased to announce that Twitter Tools 2.0 is now available!
Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates a complete, two-way integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Version 2.0 of Twitter Tools makes the plugin extensible in the same way WordPress itself is. I’ve added hooks and filters that allow other plugins to be created for Twitter Tools and extend/change/customize the way Twitter Tools works.
I get a lot of requests for features/changes that are specific to someone’s particular needs. Unfortunately I can’t build specific features for each user into the general plugin, but now other people can build plugins for it to make things work just as they want it to.
To make sure these hooks and filters work properly, I 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.
- Exclude Category for Twitter Tools – enables not tweeting posts in chosen categories.
Each of these plugins can to be activated individually from your Plugins page, and adds their configuration options to the Twitter Tools settings page. These should be great examples for anyone wanting to build a plugin for Twitter Tools.
Here are some ideas for other Twitter Tools plugins that I’ve seen requests for:
- Add tracking tokens to the end of blog post URLs that are sent to Twitter – this is all customizable with filters now, so it should be pretty easy.
- Support for yfrog, twitpic, etc. in the Twitter widget display – you can customize the output of the tweet to include an image if you find one present.
- Add hashtags to your blog post tweet using the WordPress tags associated with the post.
- Make links in Tweets open in a new window/tab.
- Only Tweet blog posts in a certain category.
- Ability to customize/add text to the blog post Tweet.
- Use http://example.com?p=123 style URLs for blog post permalinks.
- Changing how much of the tweet text is used for the post title (or changing it to something else entirely).
- Etc.
Hopefully we’ll see lots of interesting Twitter Tools plugins from folks who have been requesting these features. I’m very interested to see what people build.
I’ve also added some additional CSS classes to the tweet output and a commonly requested feature to customize the tweet prefix for new blog post notifications. I had resisted this in the past due to some edge cases that could cause problems, but I believe only a rare situation (annoyance, not fatal) is possible and I doubt folks will run into it – sounds like famous last words, right? 🙂
The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.
If you have any trouble with this, please contact the WordPress HelpCenter (512-788-9236) or you can try the WP Support Forums.
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Great, thank you for the update, some good new features.
I had previously coded a modification that looks at the tweet source (Twitter Tools) to allow for detecting if it was a blog tweet. That allowed me to change the whole format of the tweet, e.g. Blog: %s %s, or %s %s (Blog)
Have you had any thoughts on doing it that way.
Yes, that method doesn’t account for ad-hoc tweets sent from the admin interface.
I have added a shortcode function to this at the end of the twitter-tools.php file so that I can just have the tweets on a dedicated page rather then in the sidebar.
Thanks fellow Alex.
//
if(function_exists(‘add_shortcode’)){
function aktt_shortcode($args) {
extract($args);
$options = get_option(‘aktt_widget’);
$title = $options[‘title’];
if (empty($title)) {
}
return aktt_sidebar_tweets();
}
add_shortcode(‘twittertools’, ‘aktt_shortcode’);
You put the ?p=xx links in. Woo!
Yes, it wouldn’t account for ad-hoc tweets, but I assume the response sent from adding a tweet includes its id, you could insert it into the database ready for the refresh.
With the new hooks in version 2.0, I think you can likely try that out.
Thank You Alex!
One quick question though; where do I set the bit.ly tracking?
If anyone’s thinking of implementing this plugin: “Add hashtags to your blog post tweet using the WordPress tags associated with the post.” then it would be really good to have categories as an option as well as tags. The plugin architecture is a great idea in general, thanks.
Thanks for updating this very useful plugin with some much desired new features. I especially like the new custom prefix and hashtag support, which I’d hacked in to the previous release myself.
You may be interested to know I’ve modified the supplied bit.ly plugin to use tr.im instead, since that’s where I keep my own URLs. You can download the modified plugin here: http://www.johngirvi[...]ols-2-0.html
woot thanks updated!
Interesting features. I’ll try this plugin.
I’d like a Snipurl shortener with this. Could you guide me how I can take the bit-ly support and add snipurl support instead? I mean which lines in the code should I be looking at? Thanks for this awesome effort!
hi, twitter is GFWed in China,so i want to change API to round the GFW,is it feasible scheme?
Alex,
I love this plugin!!
thanks
Joachim
Plugins are a great idea!
Is there some central forum or repository for the plugins people will come up with?
And 2 requests for plugins:
-Integration with twitturly or tweetmeme for tracking retweet counts
-Pull comments on twitter into WP comments (or just let me know one that doesn’t conflict with this, and properly identifies them)
This plugin is wonderful. This helps lot to WordPress Bloggers.
[…] hat mich WordPress darauf hingewiesen, dass die Version 2.0 des Plugins erschienen ist. Neu in der Version sind unter Anderem die Unterstützung von bit.ly als URL-Shortener, das […]
[…] vÅ¡echny služby do co nejmenÅ¡Ãho množstvà nástrojů mÄ› pÅ™ivedla k výteÄnému nástroji Twitter Tools pro WordPress, který umožňuje plnÄ› integrovat váš úÄet Twitter do vaÅ¡ich stránek použÃvajÃch […]
Expand short urls would be great! (Create a blog post from each of your tweets)
http://longurl.org/api
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Hey Alex – a bug perhaps (hope this is the right place to report them) When I try to delete one of the child plugins from the plugins page WP wants to delete all the files which are there in the twitter-tools folder.
Similarly child plugin written by me was shown as having an upgrade available because in the file header I had the version as 1.0
I think this is an issue with WP rather than your plugin but insights into how this could be prevented would be appreciated
Something to create longer URL/URI would be fantastic. to make blog posts with your tweets
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Think there is a problem with headspace2. I tried without headspace2 and it works – I like it very much!
Ah sorry, I dont know why, but it es “Enforce www. Preference” which makes Twitter Tools crashing
This is a brilliant plugin, I love the daily/weekly digest idea. Thanks!!
Great job! Works flawlessly. Thanks for this contribution.
twitter tools to convert @replies to comments would be awesome…
I’ve added a plugin for the YOURLS open source URL shortening service, so you can host your own short URLs and have them integrated with Twitter Tools.
http://www.johngirvi[...]ols-2-0.html
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[…] when you add the power of other WP plugins like All-In-One SEO and Twitter Tools and some of the other more powerful plugins, you’re blog is going to skyrocket and […]
I’d love for this plugin to post to Facebook at the same time as Twitter. I was sure I saw directions somewhere on how to do that, but now I can’t find them. Anyone point me in the right direction?
Long time user! I’d like to see a more flexible approach for hash tags- I have little reason to use the same one every time. What it TwitterTools would look at the WordPress tags for a post, and add hashtags to the outgoing tweet only if there was a hashtag in the WP tags? e,g,, if I tagged my post:
dog, hate cats, #burybones, sleep
Twitter tools would just add the #burybones tag to the tweet for that post.
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Hello and thanks for the plugin!
I was wondering if there is a way of changing the way the plugin handles the tweets imported from twitter. When the tweet is imported in WP it now gives the post a name containing several first characters from the tweet text… like “today was a gre…”.
there now is a prefix for tweets created in WP but not for ones created in Twitter. Can this be added?
Thanks!
You can create a filter to do this if you like.
Ah… never mind me asking. Just found out that the problem was a trailing space in my bit.ly key. Keep up the good work, Alex!
Thanks for the answer. Unfortunately I am not capable of creating such a filter… I would not ask otherwise.
The WordPress HelpCenter can probably assist you with this: help@wphelpcenter.com or call (512) 788-9236
Hi, do you have any plans of an upgrade of twitter tools to function with WordPress 2.9(.1) ?
Also – are there any plans to add multi-widget support, similar to the functionality of Twitter Widget Pro, where you can have per-widget settings such as number of tweets ? Would make the toolkit complete.
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