Theme The Morning After

The Morning After – Twitter, anyone?

Last weekend, I have created an account on Twitter.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send „updates“ (or „tweets“; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to their Twitter profile pages, via short message service, instant messaging, or Facebook.

But why should I send my „tweets“ only to my profile page at twitter.com? Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate the tweets into the starting page of my weblog? In my opinion, this would be quite handy. So, let’s start adding Twitter updates to Arun’s The Morning After theme.

Plug-in Twitter Tools

Dowload, upload and activate Alex King’s Twitter Tools 1.1b1 plug-in. (Requires WordPress 2.3)

Twitter Tools Options page
Screshott Twitter Tools Options page

Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Dashboard > Options > Twitter Tools) to set your Twitter account information and preferences.

After inserting the Twitter username and the Twitter password, the settings have to be adjusted.

For avoiding a blaoted WP database, I denied to create a tweet when I post on my blog or to create a blog post of my Twitter update. I also do not want to post a daily digest of my tweets on my weblog.

Because of these settings, the „title for digest posts“, the „category for tweet posts“ and the „author of tweet posts“ are irrelevant.

The next option defines the number of tweets that are shown by using the aktt_sidebar_tweets function. I have set it to 3.

Due to a better appearance, opt out the ability to create tweets from your weblog.

Edit Twitter Tools

  • For editing the Twitter Tools plug-in, you have to go to the WordPress plug-in page (Dashboard > Plug-ins) and deactivate Twitter Tools again. Then, open the plug-in editor.
  • Search for the aktt_sidebar_tweets function
  • Look for the first < ul > tag in this function and change it to < ul class=“arrow“ > (without the spaces, of course.)
  • Save your changes and activate the plug-in again.

Home.php

Open the home.php in your WordPress theme editor (Dashboard > Presentation > Theme Editor > home.php). Scroll down to the comment „end asides“ and insert the following code below it:

<div class="home_asides">
<h3 class="mast">Twitter</h3>
&lt; ?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?&gt;</div>
<pre lang="php">   <!-- end twitter -->
</pre>

Click on update file & DONE!


Kommentare

11 Antworten zu „The Morning After – Twitter, anyone?“

  1. hello there,
    I’m trying to get my twitters activated. I followed all the steps but it’s still not showing up. It shows…
    See my website so you can see my problem. =(

  2. Sorry, the code highlighting plug-in creates spaces where there are none..
    The php line should be:
    < ?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?> with no space between < and ?.

  3. omg! it worked! thanks a bunchness nick!!! =)

  4. I’ve been trying exactly how to do this. Thanks!

  5. Hello
    I am using WordPress 2.51 and it seems that the Twitter Tool doesn’t work with this version. When I activated it as a plug in – it keeps giving me an error every time I tried to post a tweet and it is unable to get updates
    Has anyone had this problem yet?

  6. Hi!
    I am using 2.5.1, as well. But which version of Twitter Tools do you use?
    I’m working with the current beta release version 1.2b1.

  7. Sweet! I got it to work….couldn’t have done it without your help. Thank you.

  8. Brilliant.

  9. Thanks very much for all your detailed work on WP + TMA. I am getting the „no tweets available at the moment“ (and it’s been that way for the last 12 hours). I thought it might be a 2.6 incompatibility (i didn’t add your Tweet hack until I’d upgraded) but i see it’s working on the main page of your blog. I upgraded to the beta. still no tweets.
    I saw your fix on the twitter tools support page but that seems a little more complex than I trust myself to do. any other thoughts?

  10. Hi!
    You are sure that your twitter user name and password are correct? Have you tried to press the update tweets button?
    Twitter seems to be working… http://status.twitter.com/
    So have you tried to deactivate / activate the plug-in?

  11. […] already written a tutorial about how to add your Twitter status updates to the starting page of your blog, now I want to show you how you can enable your visitors to tweet your content to their followers. […]