The Best Twitter Wordpress Widgets – the good, the bad, the ugly

jafoca | April 29, 2009

twitter WP logoThis morning I spent a good amount of time attempting to get a decent twitter widget set up on this site to simply put my Twitter status into the widget sidebar. Fun part is I can actually justify this pursuit as work – we have been asked to integrate Twitter into a website we are currently working on that will be powered by Wordpress.

For a while now I have had Twitter integrated here – both directions. I use WP to Twitter to do Twitter notifications of new blog posts – it works quite well sofar – it integrates with the cli.gs URL shortening service automatically – which works great although requires signup for an API key. My only real gripe with this plugin is that it does not allow you to move the “WP to Twitter” field, which is shown when creating a post. I wish I could place it directly below the content area of a post, as I am editing, so that I would not forget to customize the Twitter message.

The other function I want to have (and our client wants) is a widget in my sidebar with recent Tweets.

My requirements for this are the following:

  • Define number of tweets shown
  • Light weight
  • SOMEWHAT intelligent handling of URLs, including @usernames, and others
  • Somewhat Customizable (CSS style wise)
  • More or less plug and play (it should work when I install it)
  • Available from the central Wordpress plugin directory

And now… on to the reviews…

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