Twitter Tools 3.0

When I first started posting to Twitter I soon realized that I wanted to keep a copy of that content. Twitter Tools was born shortly thereafter. Since that time Twitter has evolved, WordPress has evolved, and my vision of how best to integrate the two has evolved with them. Twitter Tools 3.0 is a complete rewrite which realizes that vision in a way I’m quite pleased with.

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts.
  • Broadcast different “new post” messages to different Twitter accounts (via Social).
  • Set-up and configuration is painless (no registering a developer app, copying keys, etc.) via integration with Social.
  • Tweets are stored as a custom post type and with custom taxonomies for accounts, @mentions and #hashtags.
  • Local copies of tweets can be easily edited and deleted via the standard WordPress admin screens.
  • Tweets can be displayed on your site via archive view, individual tweet view and via shortcodes and sidebar widget.
  • Full Twitter data is stored with each tweet.
  • An image included in the “media” data of a tweet is downloaded and saved as the featured image for the tweet.
  • Create blog posts (as status updates) from each tweet (optional).
  • Compatible with the latest Twitter API changes (as of today’s writing).

The previous versions of Twitter Tools used an additional database table to store your tweets. These are upgraded to the new format (and more data about each is downloaded from Twitter) as part of the upgrade process. If appropriate, you’ll be prompted to upgrade on the Settings screen.

I’ve been working on this release of Twitter Tools for way too long. The first beta was pushed out back in December of last year and it’s been making glacial progress since then. The good news is, I’ve been running it on my site for nearly a year now and I’m quite confident it’s stable and functions as expected – at least in my usage and environment.

Want to see it in action? Browse my tweets here (check out examples by @mention and #hashtag).

Download it from WordPress.org (where you can see screenshots, etc.), contribute on GitHub, and use it in good health!

UPDATE: check out the FAQ for more details.

This post is part of the following projects: Social, Twitter Tools. View the project timelines for more context on this post.