Showing Tweets relevant to post tags is a very popular feature used in various high ranking websites. This tutorial explains you how you can enable this and few other features for showing Tweets relevant to your blog posts, from a Twitter list or from a Hashtag etc in your WordPress site.
Tweet Blender is a powerful WordPress plugin that activates Twitter Widgets you which you can use for showing tweets in the way you want. You can use its widgets or use it inside your blog posts and pages, read its full installation and usage here.
The plugin provides you following list of useful features:
- NEW: fully localizable! Russian translation available as of 3.3.6, more languages coming soon (please get in touch if you can help)
- NEW: ability to apply filtering to lists e.g. @tweetblender/testlist|plugin will pull all tweets from that list that contain word “plugin”
- NEW: ability to get Cache Manager addon ($) that allows to backup/restore cache and delete individual tweets
- If you use custom field “tb_tags” for a post its value overrides actual tags and gets used by Tweet Blender for Tags widget (requested by Thomas P via GetSatisfaction)
- Support for non-English hashtags and filter words
- A filter that allows to filter out tweets that are from different screen names but have exactly same content
- A filter that allows to show only replies and hide original tweets
- Ability to define custom text for “view more” link
- Support for multi-keyword phrase searches (e.g. Tweet Blender)
- Ability to define name that shows up instead of twitter handle using a colon (e.g. @joesmith:Joe Smith would show “Joe Smith” for each tweet instead of “@joesmith”)
- Throttling that allows to limit number of tweets to show for each user account. You can now have X tweets for each user in the list no matter how frequently each of them tweets.
- Favorites widget that shows favorite tweets or one or multiple users
- Improved cache management controls
- Ability to qualify searches using a pipe symbol. For example @user|#fun will get all tweets from @user that contain #fun in them
- Ability to filter out tweets that come from ceratin users or contain certain undersired keywords or hashtags
- Ability to turn ON/OFF display of mentions
- Quick, simple and secure way to insert widget into your posts and pages
- Multi-widget support – include any number of widgets in the sidebar or on the page with different sources in each.
- Database-driven efficient caching
- Widget that automatically shows relevant tweets by using post’s tags
- Show tweets for one or more Twitter lists (e.g. @tweetblender/testlist)
- Allows to blend tweets from private accounts if you authorize access to your Twitter account that follows these private users (requires oAuth so PHP5 only).
- Status tab in the admin panel that shows API limits remaining and cache information
- Shows tweets from one or more Twitter users (e.g. @tweetblender)
- Shows tweets for one or more topic defined by keywords (e.g. ‘wordpress’)
- Shows tweets for one or more topic defined by Twitter hashtag (e.g. #wordpress)
- Shows tweets for multiple users, multiple topics, and multiple hashtags blended together into single stream
- Allows to turn display of user’s photo ON/OFF. Photos can be OFF in the sidebar to conserve screen space and ON on the archive page.
- Allows to replace @screennames in tweets with links to user accounts (open in new window)
- Allows to replace #hastags in tweets with links to Twitter search results for that hashtag (open in new window)
- Allows to replace URLs in tweets with links to those URLs (open in new window)
- Automatically creates a page with archive (a longer, expanded list of tweets). Can be disabled if you want to create archive manually or don’t need an archive.
- Allows to specify number of tweets to show in each widget
- Allows to specify number of tweets to show on the archive page
- Provides template tag
<?php tweet_blender_widget(); ?>to include one or more widgets on any page - Provides “refresh” icon that allows users to manually refresh tweet list
- Allows to specify refresh period which turns ON automatic refresh of the tweet list. Can be set for each individual widget instance
- Checks screennames, lists, keywords, and hashtags for validity prior to saving
- Displays “reply” and “follow” links for each tweet that appear when user places mouse over the tweet area. Can be turned ON/OFF
- Allows to create individual twitter streams for different authors by using tweet_blender_widget() tag
- Provides advanced distributed caching mechanism to store Twitter data and work around Twitter API’s connection limit
- Allows to reroute all Twitter API requests via blog’s web server to take advantage of white-listed server (with oAuth)
- Allows to filter tweets by language (for hashtags and keyword sources only)