WordPress Twitter Stream Plugin
Twitter Stream is a very simple Twitter plugin which is designed to easily show your Twitter timeline on your website. It’s functionality is very, very simple to grab a set amount of status updates from the Twitter user account you request.
Features of Twitter Stream Plugin
1. It Connects to Twitter securely using oAuth. (required)
2. It shows the twitter timeline for any public username.
3. It chooses how many tweets to show.
4. This plugin is provided with A Widget or template function.
5. This plugin does File caching to stop API overuse.
6. It shows the Optional date xx ago format, and also links to permalink for the tweet.
7. It is Customizeable via CSS.
8. Authentication facility is provided for better API limiting & ability so that the protected users can show their tweets.
9. Link to the user profile of the user you are replying to is done by @replies now.
10. Link to the Twitter search page for that hash tag is done by #tags now .
11. Customize the link to user’s profile through CSS & via function parameter.
12. It can also display the follower count.
13. Normal tweets as well as Retweets can now be displayed.
Installing the Plugin
Download the Plugin form the WordPress repository here, and then install it like any other WordPress plugin, which is as follows:
1. Download and unzip the file in your system may be your desktop.
2. Upload the extracted folder to your wp-content/plugins/ folder, with any good SFTP client.
3. Now you Enable the plugin in the WordPress plugins page.
You can also install it by using the WordPress auto installer.
How to Use It?
Twitter does not have a solution for open source applications using oAuth. So you must follow some complicated instructions to sign in through oAuth. The necessary comprehensive instructions are provided in the plugin itself.
First you have to register a Twitter App. Then save the consumer keys provided to you, then sign in with Twitter. Atlast you can show your tweets by using a widget which is a WP 2.8 & up compatible widget. If WordPress version is lower than 2.8 the you have to upgrade for security reasons.
You can call Twitter stream using:
1 twitter_stream($arg);
Taking account of API Limit?
oAuth has been implemented such that API requests will be counted against your personal account instead of your servers IP address so that the shared servers should no longer cause a problem. However to reduce the possibility of overusing the API even further caching is still in use.
Getting An Error Message!
If Twitter fails to provide a valid XML file, there is a built in error message to display. The Twitter API may be down (which Twitter claim is highly unlikely), or the plugin would have failed to read the cache file. Then delete the cache file username.cache. Use the ‘delete cache’ button which is shown on the bottom of the authorization page.
Need for Translation
You can download translations files for the plugin here. These are .po & .mo files in a zip for the languages available. For the translation to work you only need the .mo file placed in the same folder as the plugin.
Alex Smith is a Author and 10 years of experience in various topic such as like WordPress development, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes etc.
Processing your request, Please wait....
