Twitter already provides you inbuilt widget creation features. Other than this WordPress also provides you oEmbed for twitter, you can enable oEmbed in your WordPress site from Dashboard -> Settings -> Media page and then you can embed a tweet simply by pasting its URL inside your post or page content.
This article is on few other WordPress plugins that extends tweet embed features in WordPress and allows you to do some more good things with your tweets.
Tweet Blender is a popular WordPress plugin that provides you various Twitter Widgets like you can
- Display your own tweets
- Display tweets for hashtags
- Display tweets for twitter lists
- Display tweets relevant to your post content (like Huffingtonpost)
The plugin supports multiple authors, keywords and hashtags. With Tweet Blender you can display tweets from a single user or a list of users. Also you can display tweets from a certain topic, multiple hashtags or keywords, various lists, authors etc. There is a long list of this plugin features.
Screenshot showing Tweets archive page: [view more screenshots here]
Installation & Usage:
After activation specify your configuration settings from Dashboard -> Settings -> Tweet Blender admin page. You will be needing to authenticate to Twitter and allow read-only access to tweet stream (present under the Status tab).
The plugin provides you widgets you can use in your sidebar, shortcodes to use inside your posts/pages and templates to use inside your theme files.
Fetch Tweets is another plugin for fetching and showing Twitter tweets. With this plugin you can display tweets by specifying username, search results, keywords, Lists and yes you can show up combined results by adding multiple rules.
For displaying the fetched tweets the plugin provides you Widget, Shortcode, PHP Code and Custom Templates.
Installation & Usage:
Install and activate the plugin then follow the given steps:
- After activation you can set a rule from Dashboard -> Fetch Tweets -> Add Rule by User Name or Add Rule by Keyword.
- For using its widgets visit Appearance -> Widgets and use Fetch Tweets by Rule Set. You can set the rule in the widget form itself.
- The plugin also provides you shortcode to use in your posts, pages. Use the shortcode
[fetch_tweets id="123"]
Replacing 123 with your rule ID. Rule ID can be found in the Fetch Tweets admin page in your dashboard.
Screenshot showing widget settings: [view more screenshots]
For more usage instruction refer to the Other Notes section here.
As clear from its name, the plugin provides you widget and shortcodes for displaying Twitter Tweets. It is used for displaying one tweet at a time with rotation which means one tweets gets automatically and smoothly replaced by the other. Display is responsive and it shows up the recent tweets even if Twitter is down. Check out the plugin working here.
Installation & Usage:
After activation you can use its widget from Appearance -> Widgets page or you can display it via shortcode (inside your posts and pages etc) like:
[rotatingtweets screen_name='your_twitter']
The plugin allows you to decide how you want to show up tweets, you can set the number of tweets to display, you can include retweets and replies and even display a follow button if you like.
Checkout its its shortcode parameters here.
You can also set Tweets rotation speed and animation type to use in Tweet rotation.
How To Create A Twitter Application ?
Most of the above plugins uses Twitter Application, API so following are he instructions on how you can create your Twitter Application, it takes a few minutes:
- Visit My applications page on the Twitter website. Login with your Twitter username and password.
- If you don’t already have a suitable ‘application’ then create one from the Create an Application page. It’s normally best to use the name, description and website URL of the website where you plan to use Rotating Tweets. You don’t need a Callback URL if you are setting it up for the plugins discussed here.
- After clicking Create your Twitter application, click on Create my access token.
- Now copy the Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret from your Twitter application page and use it wherever required.
