What Is WordTwit?

WordTwit is a WordPress plugin for integrating your WordPress website with your Twitter account. Whenever you publish new content from WordPress Twitter will automatically be updated with a brief description of your new content along with a link back to it, bringing additional traffic and visitors to your website.

How Does It Work?

When configuring WordTwit you give your WordPress site access to publish content to your Twitter account. When you create a new post from WordPress, WordTwit will Tweet a brief description along with the post’s permalink, allowing your followers on Twitter to easily read your new content. In addition, WordTwit can be configured to only Tweet or not Tweet posts with certain tags or categories.

Using WordTwit For Social Media Campaigns

WordTwit now supports the popular UTM (Urchin Tracking Module), which allows separate WordTwit traffic via Google analytics to see how Twitter affected a campaign. The UTM information can be configured from the WordTwit admin panel.

How Do I Set It Up?

WordTwit can be easily installed through your self-hosted WordPress admin, or easily uploaded to your server. Check out the Gallery and Installation tabs for details on getting WordTwit installed, activated and configured on your website.

WordTwit Requirements

While WordTwit was designed to work cooperatively with other plugins, handle WordPress updates easily and make a very small footprint on your server, it does have a few requirements which you need to meet before installing it.

Site & Server

• Self-hosted WordPress installation
• WordPress 2.7 or higher
• WordPress Administrative account access
• PHP 4 or PHP 5

WordTwit Features

The following is a list of WordTwit features:

Basic Features

• Tweet limiting by categories and tags
• Support for scheduled posts
• Configuration of text that gets Tweeted to Twitter
• Ability to Retweet previous posts, or to force previously published posts to be Tweeted again
• Utilizes UTM (urchin tracking module) codes for Google Analytics integration

URL Shortener Support

• Support for bit.ly (requires API key)
• Support for is.gd
• Support for tiny.url
• Support for ow.ly
• Support for custom URL generation using a unique domain name

WordTwit Gallery

WordTwit Admin Features

•   Administration Panel (Top)

  A shot of the WordTwit administration panel at first load.

•   Administration Panel (Bottom)

  URL shortening options, account login, tag/category options.

•   Custom URL Generation

  WordTwit supports custom URL generation, similar to bit.ly and tinyurl.

•  

Introduction

Installation and setup of WordTwit should be pretty straight forward, but we’ve provided additional information here to help you if you get stuck.

Browse below to find out more about installing and using WordTwit.

Getting Started

Before you begin make sure you have a current backup of your WordPress installation and your database. If you’re new to a WordPress backup, you can read this step-by-step guide from WordPress.org. It’s highly unlikely anything will go wrong, but you can always be sure that it won’t matter by backing up… right?

You should also make sure that your WordPress/MU installation is up to date, and that you’re not having any other issues prior to installing/upgrading WPtouch. This will help you identify and solve any issues post-install.

Upgrading WordTwit

WordPress Admin Method:

To upgrade from within WordPress (2.7 or higher) simply click on the “upgrade automatically” link on the WordPress plugin admin page (wp-admin/plugins). The new update will be downloaded and installed automatically for you. Your admin configuration settings will remain unchanged.

Please check the Changelog for any new features which may have added settings in the admin panel which you might need to set or configure in order to use.

Zip File Upload Method:

If you’re upgrading from a previous version, you can upload the new plugin files in place of your existing files (‘../wp-content/plugins/wordtwit’ folder). Your settings will remain the same. If you’ve made changes to vore WordTwit files, you’ll need to back those up for now.

Activation

WordTwit will work ‘out-of-the-box’ once being activated, without any additional configuration using its default settings.

There are however many configurable options available in the WordTwit admin panel, located in the Settings-> WordTwit page.

WordTwit Admin Panel

The WordTwit admin panel is laid out in vertical blocks which break down the plugins configurable options into sections. This is true of all BraveNewCode plugins.

Each section contains options related to different types of functionality, i.e. Account Login, URL Shortener etc. Explore the panels and options to determine which settings apply to your installation preferences.

Visit the Gallery page for screenshots of the admin panel in action.

Accessing More Info

We’ve labelled most settings so they are self-explanatory, but where a setting might offer additional info you’ll see a red question mark (?). Clicking on the question mark opens a window which explains the feature in greater detail.

Saving and Reset

At the bottom of the admin panel you’ll see two buttons, one for saving settings and one for resetting them. The Save Settings button when pressed will save the current configuration options to your database, and the settings will persist even if you disable the plugin and re-activate it, or upgrade it.

The Reset Settings button will restore the default configuration of the plugin. This can be helpful in troubleshooting or if you wish to start over is setting up the plugin.

WordTwit Changelog

The following is a list of the various changes for each WordTwit version.

Version 2.4.4

Added: Compatibility of new API with WPtouch 1.9.13

Version 2.4.2

Added: Option to enable experimental Tweet queue (disable this if you're having pending tweet problems)

Added: hmac-sha1 routine for PHP4, should hopefully allow PHP4 users to use WordTwit again

Changed: Default behaviour is to disable the Tweet queue.

Changed: Routines that show Tweets

Removed: Old code that's not used anymore

Version 2.4.1

Added: check for error when contacting Twitter

Added: removal of Tweets from the queue when Twitter fails due to a duplicate Tweet

Added: indication of outstanding Tweets in administration panel

Version 2.4

Changed Tweet mechanism to be asynchronous.

Now queues failed Tweets for future attempts.

Better checking for failed Tiny URL conversions. Should queue failures to try again later

Updated authorization mechanism to OAuth - will require reauthorizing your user account (requires PHP5)

Version 2.3.5

Fixed bug with missing parameter

Version 2.3.4

Updated HootSuite code to fix bug in administration edit/post pages

Version 2.3.3

Removed snoopy and added a timeout on requests for get_recent_tweets

Changed time handling for WPtouch integration -- requires WPtouch 1.9.9.2

Version 2.3.2

Fixed bug having to do with garbled Tweet display in WPtouch on Twitter accounts with only one tweet

Version 2.3.1

Added support for is.gd

Added the ability to view the number of clicks on bit.ly links

Version 2.3.0

Added documentation for WordPress MU

Added ability to re-tweet old pages, or to force a tweet after an unsuccessful Twitter attempt

Version 2.2.6

Added styling for when no Tweets exist

Minor administration improvements

Added WP 2.9 compatibility & tweaks

Suppressed warning message

Added fixes as suggested by majilab for tweets & languages

Fixed bug with Twitter display times in WPtouch

Added ability for WPtouch to display recent tweets in header

Added a widget to show recent tweets

Updated minimum WordPress version requirement to 2.7

Fixed a CSS bug on avatars

Admin js and css files now only load on WordTwit Options page

Validated the admin XHTML with W3C standards

Version 2.1.6.1

Updated Fancybox admin script, css + images to 2.1.5

Removed css references to images which don't exist

Updated admin styling for BNC Global plugin appearance

Changed URL generation to work with recent changes to the ow.ly service

Added settings link for plugin when activated

Updated ReadMe with correct WP compatible version number (2.8.4)

Removed OAuth code for Twitter as it depends on PHP5. Will replace it at some point.

Fixed a bug where bitly URLs would not end up in the user's history

Linked support forum link directly to WordTwit forum

Added BNC newsletter to the admin panel

Removed utf8_encode function as it was causing problems for non-english users

Increased size of URL database field for local URL generation to 512 characters

Revised admin appearance & layout (congruent with WPtouch 1.9 admin)

Fixed a bug with garbage encoded characters being inserted into the Twitter update message

Added support for the ow.ly URL shortener.

Added code such that when a URL shortening service is down, then original permalink is used instead

Version 2.0.x

Removed link details hyperlinks when local URL is not selected

Added support for bit.ly URL shortener. Requires a valid username and API key from their site.

Fixed error message warning when tags or categories are not set on a post

Updated TinyURL generation with PHP4 routines

Updated compatibility file to not conflict with WPtouch

Added compatibility file -- should hopefully fix problems with non standard WordPress installations

Fixed bug where short URLs couldn't be created in the administration panel

Fixed MySQL query

Added POT file, please email translations to inquiry@bravenewcode.com

Fixed typos

Added ability to generate custom tiny urls

Added ability to add an alternate (i.e. smaller) domain for tiny url generation

Added integrated ability to track tiny url clicks

Added ability to include/exclude posts to WordTwit based on tags/categories

Added ability to convert all content links into custom URLs with link tracking

Major clean-up and re-styling of the administration panel

Fixed bug where WordTwit admin panel was shown to all users (whoops)

Version 1.3.x

Now tested up to WordPress 2.7.1

Old posts no longer get Twittered when modified or republished

Slight style fixes in the administration panel

Removed dependency on CURL. Now uses Snoopy.

Substantial rewrite of core WordTwit code

Awesomified the administration panel