WordPress to Twitter Plugin: Twitter Tools

Upon its launch in 2006, the microblogging tool Twitter was under appreciated and often relegated as a navel-gazing time waster. Just four years later the social networking tool has become an important communication and networking application for businesses with more than 100 million users. I’ll show you how you connect your WordPress website and your Twitter account so you can post and tweet at the same time as well as do much more to connect these two powerful online tools.

The plugin Twitter Tools offers a great way to Tweet your posts as well as display your Tweets on your WordPress website. This bi-directional connection makes a very powerful connection between your Twitter presence and your website allowing you to develop important connections through one of the most important social networking web applications available.

What You’ll Need

In order to connect your website and your Twitter account, you will first need a Twitter account. If you don’t already have an account or want another specific for this website you can easily set up an account at Twitter. Once you have gone through the Twitter account setup and verification process, make sure you have your username and password available because you will need that information to set up the Twitter Tools plugin.

Next you will need to download and install Crowd Favorite‘s Twitter Tools plugin. Please note that there are several associated plugins that expand the functionality of Twitter Tools, but also require the base plugin to work. Make sure you install and activate Twitter Tools before activating any of these child plugins.

Setting Up Twitter Tools

The first settings to configure is the account information. This will require your Twitter Username and your Twitter Password. If you created your account a while ago and you can’t remember the information, you can recover it from the Twitter website; Password Recovery. You can test that you have the correct login information input into the plugin by using the Test Login Info button. Once you have configured the Twitter Tools plugin to connect to Twitter you can move on to configuring the rest of the options. Please note that currently the Twitter Tools plugin uses Twitter’s basic authorization, but it appears that Crowd Favorite will be adding the more robust OAuth login and authentication system soon.

The first option to configure with Twitter Tools is whether every time you publish a post Twitter Tools creates a Tweet on Twitter. This is configured with either a Yes or No from the Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog option. If you set this to No, you will not be able to Tweet a post via Twitter Tools.

If you set the option to Yes, a new panel in the Post creation interface will let you toggle the option on or off for each individual post. This is a great way to share your content on your website with your Twitter followers, driving them to your website to discover more of your content.

You can set a prefix to all the Tweets generated from your site to help identify them in your Tweet stream and to help your followers that this is content coming from your site. The Tweet prefix for new blog posts option is currently a required field so set it to something that will fit in well with your messaging, but keep it down to as few characters as possible to make sure you don’t eat up too much of your allotted 140 characters per Tweet. Twitter Tools uses this prefix to identify Tweets that were generated by Posts to avoid creating a Post from that Tweet creating an infinite loop.

The next option, Set this on by default determines whether Twitter Tools will default to having the Send Posts to Twitter option set to Yes or No. If you usually post and want it Tweeted, too, then set this to Yes. If you don’t always want to Tweet your posts, then set this to No and remember that you can enable or disable this option whenever you create a new post.

The next set of options work in the opposite direction. These configure posts that are created from Tweets. The first one, Create a blog post from each of your tweets determines whether Twitter Tools should create a new post from every new Tweet you send out from Twitter. This would be useful if you are a prolific Twitter user with a lot of followers and you want to capture your Tweets in a realm that you have more control over than Twitter. It would probably makes sense to create a special section of your site devoted to those Tweets or display them in a consistent way via the Theme. One easy way to do this is by setting a category for posts created by incoming Tweets and you can do that with the next option; Category for tweet posts. You could create a Category called Tweets and assign that category to be used by Twitter Tools when creating a post from a Tweet.

You can also assign Tags to that post via the Tag(s) for your tweet posts option. Here you can define a comma delimited list of tags to apply to a Post created by a Tweet. Obvious ones might include; tweet, twitter, remote. Since a Theme can display content based on Tags, this is another good way to organize the content on your site.

And in the spirit of control, Twitter Tools also allows you to set the Author for all Posts created from a Tweet. This is determined by the next option, Author for tweet posts. If you set up an Author named “Twitter”, you could use a Theme that displayed those Posts in a unique way, giving you yet another way to structure your site based on the assigned author of the Tweet-based Posts.

As you may know, Twitter allows for conversations using the directed reply metaphor. Tweets that use the @[username] format get sent to that Twitter user allowing replies to be sent to another Twitter user. Sometimes this back and forth reply dialog can get out of hand, detract from the original Tweet. Twitter Tools allows you to configure whether or not Tweet replies are used in your Sidebar, Digests or Posts created from Tweets. This is configured by the Exclude @reply tweets in your sidebar, digests and created blog posts option. Setting this option to No will add Tweeted replies.

Twitter Tools allows for the creation of Tweets from Posts and the creation of Posts from Tweets, but it can also simply display your recent Tweets in your sidebar. A Twitter Tools Widget controls where in the Sidebar these Tweets appear and the next option configures how many to show. Tweets to show in sidebar determines how many Tweets to show. If you Tweet frequently, you may want to show quite a few Tweets in your Sidebar. If you use Twitter less frequently, you may only want to show a few Tweets.

Twitter Tools also allows you to create Tweets directly via the Widget in the Sidebar without creating a Post. If you spend most of your time on your site and don’t want to navigate over to Twitter, you can Tweet right from your sidebar. The Create tweets from sidebar option toggles this ability on or off. Since this ability requires a little Javascript magic to make happen, you can also select which Javascript library to use; jQuery or Prototype via the JS Library to use option.

The final standard option determines whether you give Twitter Tools credit via a link in the widget. The Give Twitter Tools credit option is a great way to share the love for this great plugin and give Crowd Favorite the recognition they deserve.

There are some currently experimental features of Twitter Tools that we will discuss in the Advanced Uses of Twitter Tools section below. Now that the plugin is configured, let’s put it to use!

Using Twitter Tools

Since Twitter Tools allows for three different types of connection between Twitter and your WordPress website, we will walk through all three starting with the most basic; displaying your Tweets in your sidebar.

To display your Tweets in your Sidebar, you will need to add the Twitter Tools Widget to one or more of your sidebars. Once you have done this, the only configuration you will need to make to the widget is how you would like to Title the Widget. Names like “Twitter” or “Tweets” help clarify for the site visitor what the content in the sidebar is. Now when you Tweet, your website will display a stream of those Tweets after a short delay (approximately 10 minutes).

In addition to using the Twitter Tools Widget, you can also use a Shortcode to display your Tweets on your site. On any Page or Post you can add a Shortcode in the format;

[[aktt_tweets]]

and a list of your most recent Tweets will appear. If you want to show a different number of Tweets than the number you set as the default, you can specify how many Tweets to show via the Shortcode:

[[aktt_tweets count=5]]

with the count number determining how many to show specific for that Post or Page.

If you are developing or modifying a Theme, you can build in support for Twitter Tools using the Twitter Tools Template Tag

php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?>

or

php aktt_latest_tweet(); ?>

to display the latest Tweet.

Now that you have Twitter Tools displaying your Tweets on your website, why not tell your Twitter Followers about your latest Post on your website? When you create a new Post, if you have enabled the option to create a Tweet from a Post, you can select the Send Post to Twitter option that now appears in an option box when you create a post. This will create a Tweet with the prefix you specified with an excerpt of the content of your post and a link back to your post. The link can be encoded using on of the URL Shortening Services plugins that we will discuss in the Advanced Uses section next.

Finally you can also configure Twitter Tools to create a post from your Tweets. Since there is nothing to do other than the initial configuration, using this functionality is automatic once it is set up. But don’t worry if you have Tweets from Posts and Posts from Tweets set up. Twitter Tools uses the Prefix you assigned in the configuration process to prevent and infinite loop and the possible destruction of the universe. Nice, huh?!

Advanced Uses of Twitter Tools

There are some options on the Twitter Tools settings page that are currently listed as “experimental”. These experimental features involve creating a Digest from your Tweets as a Post. This Tweet Digest Post can be automatically created on a daily or weekly basis and the Post title can be configured. Since these features are currently listed as experimental, I would caution their use on a production website, but I have not had any issues while testing them.

Twitter Tools not only offers all the functionality we described above, it also creates some hooks that other plugins can connect to expanding upon the base that Twitter Tools provides. One of the best ways to make use of this functionality is through URL Shortening Services. Since Twitter only allow 140 precious characters, a variety of web applications have sprung up to create a unique shortened URL from a long URL. One of the most popular is bit.ly and there is a Twitter Tools plugin that automatically shortens the URL to the Post that is being Tweeted. This means you can get more of your post excerpt in the post so your Twitter Followers get even more information about the Post and even more reason to visit your site.

These hooks can be used in other ways, too. There is a Twitter Tools plugin that tags all your URLs that are posted to Twitter with Google Analytics tags for valuable tracking data via the Google Analytics Tagger plugin. You can also add Twitter Hashtags to Tweets that are created from Posts via Twitter Tools. There are currently several other Plugins for Twitter Tools and with the popularity of Twitter and the functionality of Twitter Tools, I expect a growing number of plugins will allow for an expanding range of options.

Summary

Twitter Tools has a powerful set of tools to connect your website and Twitter. It comes with lots of configurable options and expandability built in. Crowd Favorite has launched a WordPress Help Center service that can support this plugin and WordPress issues in general. The plugin also has some documentation and an FAQ embedded directly in the configuration page of the plugin making it even easier than most plugins to make sure you get your setup right. I highly recommend this plugin.

Twitter Tools [xrr rating=5/5 label=""]