GKauten Consultingv1.2

We have all undoubtedly heard of the new internet sensation, Twitter! Chances are you probably already have a Twitter account or have several friends that do. Well for those of us that do have Twitter, and of course a WordPress blog, there is just something neat about the idea of incorporating them for a little cross-site promotion. Thankfully, Twitter already thought about this and produced quite a wonderful little API to do this. Now, to make it better, I have packaged everything up into a simple little plugin aptly named Humble Twitter which will allow you to display your Twitter Tweets on your WordPress blog. You can put them in your sidebar, before or after post content, pretty much anywhere you want. To top it all off I built in a few different controls that allow you to quickly and easily customize the appearance of your Tweets without having to hack through any files.Installation is quick and simple. You simply download one of the two packages available below. Unzip this package in your plugin folder (wp-content/plugins), or upload the files to your plugin folder, either/or. Once the files are in their proper place, log in to your WordPress control panel, go to the Plugins section and activate Humble Twitter. Once active you will now have a new submenu in the Settings pane on the left. Click on the Humble Twitter submenu and be sure to enter your Twitter credentials so that the plugin can access the API and retrieve your tweets. You will see that you can also play around with the elements used to construct the Tweet output and even preview it prior to saving and changes. Then the last thing you need to do is add the function reference in whichever template file you would like. To place it in the sidebar, you would use ’sidebar.php’ and so on and so forth for the other template areas if that is where you would like it. The code you need to insert into the template file is as follows:

<?php if ( function_exists( “humble_twitter” ) ) { humble_twitter(); } ?>

What this does is essentially checks to make sure the function exists prior to calling it. This way, if there was an error with your site or if the plugin was for some reason unavailable, your users would not see any annoying errors or garbled output. Instead it will just disappear until the issue is resolved. Remember, Humble Twitter is designed to manage it’s own structure abilities meaning you do not need to encase it in any <div> or <p> elements unless you specifically want to. Just be sure you reference the options in the Humble Twitter admin and make sure nothing conflicts with your custom structure.

Version 1.0

• Ability to modify Twitter credentials
• Ability to change plugin output title
• Ability to change the number of tweets displayed (up to 200)
• Comments automatically removed
• Ability to control plugin output structure

Version 1.1

• Ability to modify Twitter credentials
• Ability to change plugin output title
• Ability to change the number of tweets displayed (up to 200)
• Option to show/hide ‘Follow Me’ link
• Option to show/hide comments
• Option to show/hide tweet post date localized based on Twitter UTC offset
• Ability to choose whether in daylight savings time or not
• Ability to control plugin output structure

Version 1.1.2

• Fixed Tweet Display Error in conjunction with Comment Display Toggle
• Cleaned up error handling capabilities
• Optimized output supporting functions for better performance

It has recently come to my attention through varied internet searches that the name Simple Twitter had in fact been used previously for a WordPress plugin. Originally it was introduced and seemingly abandoned in 2007, until popping back up again recently in April of 2009. To prevent confusion and with respect to the other developers, I have renamed my plugin to Humble Twitter.