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 2.3.3

Version 2.3.2

Version 2.3.1

Version 2.3.0

Version 2.2.6

Version 2.1.6.1

Version 2.0.x

Version 1.3.x