Twitter Tracker free WordPress plugin

A widget, Twitter Search Tracker, which allows you to specify and display a Twitter search (or a Twitter hashtag) in your sidebar. Twitter searches are very flexible, and you can display anything from Hashtags to individual, or aggregated Twitter streams. Another widget, Twitter Profile Tracker, allows you to show the tweets from a specific user in your sidebar. With the profile and search widget, you can choose to only show tweets with a particular hashtag, to control which tweets get shown on your site. You can also elect not to show retweets or “@” replies. By default this plugin uses a Twitter API to provide avatar images, unfortunately this process triggers Twitter to drop some cookies on visitors. If you want to continue using avatars in your widgets are avoid Twitter cookies, you can use the partner plugin Twitter Tracker Avatar Cache. If you want to avoid the use of cookies, and don’t need avatars in your widget (or are hiding the avatars with CSS) then you can use the Twitter Tracker Blank Avatars partner plugin. The plugin puts “Twitter Tracker” fields in the post and page screens, you can enter a specific query into this metabox and this will override the query entered on the widget editor… this means you can have individual Twitter search queries in the widget for each of your posts and pages. If you enter nothing in those fields then the widget will use the Twitter search query on the widget editor screen. (Developers, you can add this metabox to custom post types although you will need to use the tt_post_types_with_override filter to get the metabox fields to save… check out the code.) The HTML output is fairly well classed, but if you need to adapt it you can. Create a directory in your theme called “view”, and a directory within that one called “category-images-ii”. Then copy the template files view/twitter-tracker/widget-content.php and view/twitter-tracker/widget-error.php from the plugin directory into your theme directory and amend as you need. If these files exist in these directories in your theme they will override the ones in the plugin directory. This is good because it means that when you update the plugin you can simply overwrite the old plugin directory as you haven’t changed any files in it. All hail John Godley for the code which allows this magic to happen. Filters and actions These notes mainly for developers: tt_avatar_url filters – Use this to change the Twitter Avatar URLs provided to the template. The [Twitter Tracker Avatar Cache](https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tracker-avatar-cache/) partner plugin uses these filters to provide cookie stripping caching for these avatars. (NOTE: The tt_avatar_bigger_url filter no longer exists, as I cannot find a way to access larger icons with the Twitter API.) tt_post_types_with_override filter – Add or remove post types which can override the search query in a search widget. tt_allowed_html filter – WARNING – incorrect use of this filter could make your website vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks; if in doubt, do not use it. Amend the HTML elements and attributes allowed in the preamble and HTML after values. This filter passes a second param specifying the context the allowed HTML is for. tt_cache_expiry filter – The default cache for each widget is 300 seconds. Hook this filter to change this, but do not lower it too much on busy sites as you’ll run out of API accesses and your site will be slower. tt_no_tweets filter – The string displayed in the search widget when no tweets are found. The second parameter passed is the search string being used, and the third parameter is an array of other variables relating to this widget and search request.

Translations

* Dutch translation by Milo van der Linden of De OpenGeoGroep * Slovak translation by Branco Radenovich of Web Hosting Geeks Provenance and plans Plugin initially produced on behalf of WordCamp UK, 2009. Initial version 2 development funded by SamFry Ltd. Any issues: contact me. Development for this plugin is hosted on Github, feel free to fork and submit issues there. Installation: Download twitter-tracker.zip Unzip Upload twitter-tracker directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory Go to the plugin management page and enable the plugin Now go through the authorisation steps below OR: From your admin area, choose “Plugins” then “Add New” Search for “Twitter Tracker” Select “Install Now” Give yourself a pat on the back Now go through the authorisation steps below Authorisation: Go to “Settings” > “Twitter Tracker Auth” Click on “Authorise with Twitter” and follow the prompts