Velvet Unravelled

Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget

Posted on November 30, 2006 at 7:14 pm

Last updated: 21st June, 2010
I created the Twitter sidebar widget for WordPress because I wanted something more customisable than the badges issued by Twitter. If you know your way around CSS you can style it yourself, otherwise it will keep the default styling of lists in your sidebar. The plugin has been tested on this site with WordPress 3. It requires either WordPress 2.2 or for earlier WordPress versions you can install the Widgets plugin from Automattic. If you want to, skip installation instructions and go to the download section. There’s also a list of known flaws and planned improvements on the next page.

Advantages of the Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget include:

The ability to customise the number of updates shown in your sidebar
Individual links to each status update on Twitter
Should match the current styling of your sidebar (depending on how you’ve styled lists)
You can style your Twitterings however you like using CSS. This opens up more options for you if you use Twitter as a mobile blogging tool
You can choose whether to display your Twitter name before each post
You can customise text between the post text and the relative time
You can show or suppress @replies. Be careful how many tweets you show if you do a lot of replying – if all your recent tweets are @replies, the widget won’t show anything.

Installation

If you’ve used widgets before, it should be fairly standard installation. Download the zipfile and drop it in your widgets folder, unzip it, activate in the WP plugins admin, and update options on the Sidebar widgets options page. The good folks at Automattic have documented the use of widgets and installation of new widgets.

Unless you particularly want your blog to show the Twitters from wptwitter, you’ll need to add the widget to your sidebar and update the options on the Sidebar Widgets panel (under the “Presentation” menu) with your Twitter username.

Things you should know before using this widget

My coding skills are being developed, so fix-ups take a while, but there shouldn’t be anything in there which will break your installation (assuming it’s fairly standard). I just didn’t want to give you a false impression I am an experienced coder or programmer because I’m not. This is my first plugin and though I have plans to improve on it in the future I can’t offer a timeline at this stage.

The plugin is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License and comes without warranties and no responsibility will be accepted if it breaks your WordPress installation (or anything else). As far as I am aware there should be nothing in there which will do damage. I hope that it works for you. If not, I will try to fix things if I can, but you may have to wait until someone who knows more than I do can help me to fix it.

More information, suggestions and feedback

The current version of the Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget is 2.0 which was released on 21st June 2010. To keep up to date with updates to this widget you can friend wptwitter on Twitter which will only be used for updates regarding this plugin, and maybe information about a future release which does not require the Widgets plugin from Automattic.

You can also subscribe to the feeds at my blog Velvet Unravelled if you like, but at this stage you will receive all updates to my blog, and not just the ones relating to this plugin.

The newest post relating to the current release of this plugin is located at: WordPress Twitter Sidebar Widget version 2.0
This is the best place to leave suggestions and feedback.

Previous posts relating to this plugin are located at:

Download

Download wptwitter.zip (Current version 2.0, and works with WordPress 3.)

View the release history of the plugin.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome in the comments section of the post WordPress Twitter Sidebar Widget version 2.0

Thanks and credits

Obviously, the good people at Obvious Corp, for creating Twitter in the first place.
The people at Automattic Inc for providing the WordPress Widget plugin and good examples to learn from (oh, and they do stuff to WordPress too ;o) )
My ever-so-patient partner and my friends for putting up with me when I’m grumpy and sick
David Long for testing the first version of the plugin for me.

PS If you feel so inclined, a link back is always appreciated but not compulsory. Thanks to David Long for his suggestion. :o)

Please see the next page for planned improvements to the plugin.

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