Buddypress Twitter Plugin
May 20, 2009Here’s what the the BP Twitter plugin for Buddypress offers your site:
- Adds a new Settings page for people to configure their Twitter ID and psw.
- Adds options to selectively tweet posts (in the Add New post screen for blogs - if the blogs component is enabled in BP )
- Adds a screen where logged-in users can send tweets from within BP if they’ve configured their Twitter login details.
- Adds a checkbox and Ajax preview to the Wire so that people can tweet their wire posts.
- Adds all new tweets sent from within BP to the Activity page (but not for tweeted posts since new posts already show up there)
- Integrates a Twitter menu item in the user’s public nav bar if they’ve configured their Twitter ID and psw. This allows the public to view the user’s last 20 tweets. It also shows the number of “followers” and “following” for the user, plus the total tweet count.
- Integrates a Twitter Trends pages that shows the most popular search phrases at Twitter over a 7 day time span. There is also an option to display today’s trends at the bottom of a user’s list of tweets.
- Adds a multi-instance widget to the blogs (if the blogs module is enabled in BP) to display tweets in the sidebar. Because this is a multi-instance widget it can be used for blogs that have more than one author or for users who have more than one Twitter account - e.g. each widget instance can be configured with a unique Twitter account.
- Adds a multi-instance widget to the blogs (if the blogs module is enabled in BP) to display Twitter search results in a blog sidebar. You can define the search terms or phrases using boolean operators such as “or” and the minus symbol, and set your preferred language to filter search results.
- It’s performance friendly. After getting the user’s tweets, trends, and search data from Twitter the data is stored for one hour before being refreshed - unless a user posts a tweet from within BP or tweets a blog post - in those cases the tweet cache refreshes. The same holds true for the trends data - except trends data is site-wide, meaning it is only downloaded once per hour regardless of how many users have Twitter configured in their account.
- The caching mechanism works with WP Cache (or other cache tools that integrate WP Cache - such as WP Super Cache and derivatives) and if there’s no caching enabled then it will use the database to cache data.
This plug has not been released yet. Be patient as we test it as thoroughly as we can. You can help by using it at this site!
