Auto Tweet 2.0 - Auto Tweet provides a mechanism for cross-posting your WordPress blog entries to your Twitter account. The plugin will add a checkbox to your Write Post form. When this box is checked, publishing the post will also submit the content of that post to Twitter. You may find this plugin would be most useful if you have already implemented some type of solution to accommodate Twitter-style short posts on your blog, like the Sideblog Wordpress Plugin I use to power my Cuppa Joe mini-blog.

This plugin makes database modifications. I have tested it as thoroughly as I am able and have had no problems, but just the same you should backup your database before installing this plugin. Nothing is perfect, and my code is certainly no exception. That said, the database modifications have worked perfectly for me on four different WordPress installations running versions 2.0.10, 2.0.11 RC1 and 2.2. I don't anticipate anyone will experience difficulties, but I'd hate for you to be caught unprepared.

Upon activation, Auto Tweet will add a new column to the posts table in your database. This column is used to keep track of which posts have already been "twittered" and should prevent multiple submissions.

Before Auto Tweet will function, you'll have to visit the options page (Options -> Auto Tweet) to input your Twitter username and password.

See also: readme.txt

Compatibility:

  • Known to be compatible with: WordPress 2.0.10, 2.2 - 2.2.3, 2.3 - 2.3.1

  • Should be compatible with: all versions 2.0 and higher

  • Requires: A Twitter account

License:

Change log:

  • v2.0 - Released 2007-11-22. This version now uses regular expressions to convert hyperlinks in your output to a Twitter-friendly format. What will appear in your WordPress post as <a href="http://feastofcrumbs.com/">A Feast of Crumbs</a> will be sent to Twitter as A Feast of Crumbs ( http://tinyurl.com/24w7wc ). The readme contains important additional information on this feature.

  • v1.5 - Released 2007-11-12. Saved password is now masked on the options page. Text emphasis may optionally be preserved by swapping <i>, <em>, <b> and <strong> tags with user-defined symbols configured through the options page. The JavaScript character counter now reflects the number of characters that will be submitted to Twitter, not the raw number of characters in the post editor.

  • v1.2 - Released 2007-07-20. Added JavaScript character counter to the Write Post page. Many minor improvements to the form elements on the Write Post page. Improved logic for truncating posts longer than 140 characters.

  • v1.1.1 - Released 2007-06-07. Fixed incorrect address in Plugin URI field. Oops.

  • v1.1 - Released 2007-06-06. Posts made with Auto Tweet will now identify on Twitter as "from Auto Tweet" rather than "from web."

  • v1.0.1 - Released 2007-06-07. Fixed incorrect address in Plugin URI field. Oops.

  • v1.0 - Released 2007-05-27. Initial release.

To do:

  • Add character counter to give user an indication of what will be truncated.

  • Auto Tweet will truncate what it submits to Twitter down to 140 characters, which may create horribly bad HTML by, say, chopping a link in half or only sending part of a <b> tag. I need a solution for that. strip_tags() would work well, but I might also want some kind of solution to process links differently, perhaps using TinyURL.

  • Add a feature to automatically process links by replacing the link text with the link href for submission to Twitter, possibly something using TinyURL.

  • (Maybe) add a dedicated Write Tweet page, which would submit content to Twitter without also posting it in WordPress.

  • (Maybe) add support for future posting.

  • (Maybe) add username/password verification.