This morning I went to the rent-a-coder website and found a guy who actually had a project open that asked for twitter integration on Wordpress. Naturally, I bid but unfortunately did not win the bid (I’ve just registered, you see) but the guy paid $10 nevertheless. So here is a short tutorial that will save you $10 or about fifteen minutes on google.

Let’s start with the easy stuff:

Twitter Updates

Plugins

1. Let’s add a twitter widget to your sidebar. Go to the plugins section of you WordPress menu on the left. Click on add new. Search for “Wickett Twitter Widget” and click on install on the right. There are lots of twitter plugins and I cannot start reviewing them all because there are so many. I just use this one because I got it first. If you’re having problem installing the plugin, consult the wordpress guide. Once you click install, the plugin should download to your wordpress directory and activate.

Twitter Widget

2. Next go to appearance > widgets. Drag the twitter rectangle from the left where it says “available widgets” to the right where it should say “sidebar”. The picture on the left should come up. Type in the title, such as “My Twitter Updates”, then your twitter account name which is the twitter.com/accountname. In my case “WAjanusdesigns”. You can set the maximum number of tweets from just one up to twenty. You can also hide replies. At the end, you can customize the text between your tweet and timestamp. Here’s an example:

“I just finished a new #CSS #tutorial, go check davepcguy.com and read it!” Alexander said 20h ago.

If you don’t want the widget anymore, simply remove it. Go to plugins > installed, and deactivate the plugin, and then you can delete it.

“Twitter THIS!”

I love those “twitter this” buttons on the bottom of almost all blogs on the internet. Well, let’s go one step further, let’s install a plugin that can “stumble this”, “facebook this”, and support tens of other websites. By far, there is one plugin that basically EVERYONE knows. It’s called “sociable”. Go to plugins > add new and type in “sociable” and it should be the first plugin to come up. Install it real quick and go down to settings > Sociable. Here’s what you’ll see:

Sociable

So above, you can you click off all the different sites you want at the end of every post you make. All of them are pre-formatted in the “twitter this!” kind of way. Try it out at the end of this post and you’ll see what I mean. You can also choose to add the “print” button as well as the “e-mail” button.
Scroll down and check out the rest of the features.

share this

Ignore the first two features, I don’t even know what they mean. The “tagline” is equivalent to the “Share and Enjoy” in the picture above. You can change it to anything else you wish to. “Position” gives you the option to customize where the above bar will show up. It can show up only at the front page, individual pages, every blog post (my choice). Next is CSS and Text Links. Leave CSS checked and text links unchecked. “Text Links” will disable images. You can switch out and use your favorite icons under “image directory”. Next you can use a “thickbox” or an “iframe”, just set the width and height. Next you can choose if the links will open new windows or just redirect the reader to the page. I’d rather the links open new windows so I left that checked. The next two options are completely up to you. Don’t forget to rate them!

Conclusion

And that’s it! Now your blog is completely integrated with twitter! There are hundreds more plugins and all offer you different features. Most though, offer you the basic features of the above plugins. If you want more from twitter, scout around and see what you can find. If you follow some of the people I do on twitter, they frequently post links to new and better twitter plugins.
I hope you enjoyed my short article! Don’t forget to try out my sociable bar right below !