Wordpress Twitter Plugin
Wordpress Twitter Plugin is a cool plugin that will add a beautiful Tweets widget to your wordpress blog.
You can choose to display your Twitter timeline or your friends’ timeline in the widget. You can even choose to display tweets on a keyword, depending upon your blog’s niche. For eg., if your blog is about wordpress, its themes and plugins, you can choose to display tweets on the keyword “wordpress”.
If you have a blog on iphones then you may add a Wordpress Twitter widget that displays all tweets on the keyword “Iphone”!!! This makes your blog more useful to your readers, as they will be able to discover some cool tweets (links) related to your niche.
The widget is available in three different themes – blue, green and red. You can preview the widget live here on Bestindianbloggers
How to install Wordpress Twitter Plugin?
- 1. Download the plguin zip file and upload it via “Plugins” –> “Add New” –> “Upload” in wordpress. Alternatively, you can choose to search for the term “Wordpress Twitter” and install it directly from wordpress.
- 2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- 3. Go to “Settings” –> “Wordpress Twitter” and specify the Twitter user name, password, Widget’s width, height, theme (style), number of tweets to display etc. If you want to display tweets on a keyword, choose “Search” against “Timeline” and specify the keyword
- 4. Go to Widgets and add the “Wordpress Twitter” widget to your sidebar.
- 5. Alternatively, you can also directly add the following code to wherever you want to display the widget.
<?php $bibtweets=new bibtweets(); $bibtweets->printBox(); ?>
That’s all folks!!! Install WP Tweets and enjoy the widget.
Video demo of installing Wordpress Twitter Plugin:
Wordpress Twitter Plugin Options:
The following image shows the various configurable options in wordpress twitter plugin.
Wordpress Twitter Widget:
The following image is a red themed widget as seen on a wordpress blog. It is showing Bestindianblogs Friends Timeline.
Wordpress Twitter Keyword Widget:
The following image is a blue themed widget as seen on a wordpress blog. It is showing tweets for the keyword “Wordpress”.
Wordpress Twitter Keyword Widget:
The following image is a green themed widget as seen on a wordpress blog.
Download Wordpress Twitter Plugin from wordpress repository @ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-twitter/!!!
Thanks to Ptwix for being the inspiration behind this plugin. Ptwix can be used on any PHP based site, but lacked the automation of a wordpress plugin. Wordpress Twitter Plugin is easily configurable and can be used on wordpress blog.Besides, it can automatically detect the presence of Curl and use it for retrieving Tweets.If Curl is not enabled on your wordpress server, the plugin uses file_get to retrieve the tweets. We have plans to extend the capabilities of this plugin beyond what is there currently.Until then, enjoy showing beautiful Wordpress Tweet widgets on your wordpress blog.
FAQs:
Can I adjust the width and height of the widget?
Yes for sure.You can easily configure the width and height via the plugin settings (Settings — >Wordpress Twitter)
Can I determine the number of tweets to show in the widget?
Yes.You can configure the number of tweets to show in the widget via the plugin settings (Settings –> Wordpress Twitter).
Can I hide my “Follow me on twitter” link in the widget?
Yes. It is turned off by default.You can turn it on to let your blog readers follow you on twitter.
Can I display the widget at any place other than the sidebar?
Yes. You can do so by placing the php code (refer above) in the appropriate theme file.
What version of PHP does this plugin require?
The plugin needs PHP 5.0 and above.Most good webhosts would have already migrated to the latest version of PHP. If you don’t have PHP 5.0 or above, ask your webhost to upgrade PHP.
Version 1.4 of the plugin can work even on earlier versions of PHP.
It installed easily but when I put the widget into the sidebar it’s empty. I notice it’s not appearing on your blog, either.
I am using your plugin and getting a whole bunch of error messages. Can you explain how to fix this?
Warning: fopen(/home/cganz/public_html/wordpressunleashedonline.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bibtweets/cache/bibtcache.xml) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/cganz/public_html/wordpressunleashedonline.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-twitter/BiBTweets.php on line 224
Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/cganz/public_html/wordpressunleashedonline.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-twitter/BiBTweets.php on line 225
I’ve tried deleting and reinstalling from your download but still get the same errors. Any ideas?
@Cary, If you change from user timeline or friends’ timeline to search timeline and back you may get this error for the time period you have configured(Tweets refresh time interval which is by default 60 seconds).Then it disappears. For now, don’t make this change frequently. I will fix this soon in the next version.
Hi. Does that mean that if I make the change one more time and then leave it alone it will work. I am doing a video for placement on my WordPressUnleashedOnline.com/blog blog for the WordPress Plug-in of the day and wanted to show how this works.
Thanks
Cary
Hi!
I’ve installed the Wordpress Twitter plugin via the WordPress dashboard’s Plugin – Add New interface, but it installs it in a directory named “wordpress_twitter” instead of “bibtweets”.
Also, I get a 401 Unauthorized when the plugin tries to access Twitter to retrieve my friends timeline.
I haven’t been able to get the plugin working yet due to the errors, but I’m sure you’ll eventually have it sorted out.
PS: I’ve used version 1.0 from earlier today and I see you’ve made version 1.1 available now.
yes, the directory wordpress_twitter is correct and you don’t have to worry about it. 1.1 is a cosmetic change and nothing else.How about user timeline and search timeline?
But note that if you switch from user timeline or friends timeline to search timeline then you will get errors for the configure refresh time interval (default is 60 seconds).then it will get ok. But if you have a older version of PHP, this plugin won’t work and you will have to ask your webhost to upgrade PHP.
401 Unauthorized is strange….Are you using the right username and password combination?
It’s now been quite a while and still no luck Any suggestions?
If you have configured 60 seconds (default), then it should have worked correctly after 60 seconds.If not, then you have a different error. What is the error that you get? If it has got anything to do with json_decode or SimpleXMLElement, then you have a older PHP version.You should have PHP 5.2 or greater.
Ok…I just checked your first comment for the error you get. Have you define ABSPATH in your wordpress config file (wp-config.php) in your root directory.If you had commented it, uncomment it?
It is my bad…I had messed up the directory….Nitin’s comment helped me detect it…Released version 1.3 to correct it…
Hi cary and others…i have made a few typos and that caused the errors..i have released version 1.3 and
it is yet to be reflected in WP repository.Version 1.3 of the plugin is now available for download from wordpress plugin repository.Oops! I replied to your previous comment without scrolling down to read this one. I’m glad I could be of assistance in fixing the problem.
Hi,
I have installed this plugin, Its working fine for me.. I have two question.
1. Is it possible to customize the design of this plugin?
2. How should I remove “Follow me on twitter” text and Image before it?
I am not sure why you want to remove the “Follow me on Twitter ” text….any particular reason?
It’s interesting concept, but it really need much space
The width and height are customizable through the settings –> “Wordpress Twitter”. I am not sure why you say that is needs much space…
Very nice looking plugin you have here. I’ve no idea why people at the wordpress.org site don’t give you the credits you deserve. There maybe still some tweaking to t done, but it’s looking awesome as it is.
A few small remarks though. When the width goes below 250 pixels, the design looks distorted. This is because of the “Follow me on Twitter” text. Removing it solves this, or shortening the text. You may want to make the text adjustable.
A related problem is that when you have smaller text, it fits the top bar, the twitter icon (top right corner) will drop one line. The reason is that the div around “follow me” text is positioned with “left: -30px”. Use “margin-left:-30px” (about line 84 in your CSS) and the problem goes away.
Still, it is nice if whatever text a user has in the caption bar, the design won’t get distorted. To solve that, add a fixed width to the top bar DIV and a overflow:hidden to it. This will solve future problems with this.
Then I also have a feature request: it would be nice if we could have a different keyword to search for per post, or even automatically retrieved the tags per post or header or both. That would add so much value to this!
Still a five star plugin for what it offers out of the box!
– Abel –
PS: see the workaround for the floating div problem here, or any other page on my site.
In addition, I noticed that the caching goes bad and returns always empty (which is shown as two posts from 1970…) when you change some of the settings, i.e. from type search to type user to type friends and v.v. Changing the nr of returned posts is not reflected directly.
The solution to all this I found in deleted the cache directory manually, in which case it is automatically rebuilding. You might want to add that as a feature too: remove cache when settings change.
Thanks for your detailed comments.Will take a look at these.
Hi!
Just wanted to say that your program is incredible. I’ve installed it and I just have one comment as well as one suggestion.
Comment:
At the end of my posts, the time and date of all my posts is as follows
31 Dec 1969 18:59
Can it be set to the current date and time? If so, how?
On my suggestion:
I’ve seen one Twitter Plug-in give the option of excluding the “@ replies” of the user as seen on the plug-in. Can this option be included into your program?
Great job again and thanks!
- Tedi31
This is an excellent plugin but I am getting a lot of errors during the plugin install.
You will have to be more specific and there are many users who are already using this plugin and I have a demo setup as well…So if you are getting errors, you should tell me what errors. The errors may not have something to do with this plugin.