What is Tweet Import
Tweet Import is a WordPress plugin that imports Twitter tweets from multiple Twitter accounts and lists into WordPress. By importing tweets, Tweet Import actually creates WordPress regular posts using the content of the imported tweets. It allows importing Twitter feeds to different categories, and allows tagging imported tweets using user defined tags and/or the tweet content #hashtags. Tweet Import requires no authentication and can be used to import the user posted tweets and retweets from the specified Twitter accounts and lists.
Copying content created by other people and claiming ownership is unethical and illegal. Please use this plugin in a decent and legal way. The author of this plugin is not responsible for any misuse or infringement of any legal laws caused by bad use of this plugin.
Features
Tweet Import allows importing the following types of Twitter feeds:
- User Public Timeline: the public feed of a specific user account. This includes the tweets and retweets posted by the account owner of the Twitter user
- Favorites Feed: includes the tweets favorite by the Twitter user
- List: The tweets that appear on a user created list
For every imported feed, Tweet Import supports the following options:
- Assign a specific author for the imported tweets. This is useful if multiple authors use the same WordPress installation.
- Import Twets to a specific category
- Add user defined tags to the imported tweets and created posts
- Identify Twitter user names and make them clickable to their Twitter public profile pages
- Extract #hashtags from the tweet content and add them as tags to the created posts
- Make #hashtags clickable to either the Twitter search page or locally to the tag page on the local site
- Remove the name of the Twitter author [ @name: ] prefix from imported tweets
- Identify links in tweet content and make them clickable to their respective URL’s
Comments
I must be doing wrong, it is collecting my tweets but am I supposed to get a blog entry from the results? I’m not getting anything.
@Dave
Once you setup the plugin, it will automatically import tweets as normal blog posts.
Unless you are controlling what posts are displayed, the posts created by Tweet Import should appear on the home page, category and archive pages, and in feeds. If you are using plugins to post a new tweet when adding a post, this plugin will also add a new tweet as it would for normal posts.
Would you please provide more information about your issue. Please feel free to send me an email with some clarifications on the setup options and the number of imported tweets as shown in the Feed Info section of the plugin configuration page.
Is it possible to only import tweets with a specific Hashtag?
@Robin
When I designed the plugin, I thought it would be better not to include search feed import (the only way to retrieve tweets with #hashtags is search) for two reasons. One is performance, of course… and I thought that search capabilities might cause Tweet Import to be abused… and I wanted to keep the plugin away from those who try to download the whole internet
Sorry for that!
Thanks for your fine Plugin!
It would be fine, if the Tweets (optional) could be imported without creating a headline.
@Harald
Thank you… Will look for an option and let you know if omitting the title (headline) is possible.
My only problem is that I changed the UTC Timezone of my blog, to fit my country (UTC -3) and now every post imported is scheluded to 3 hours later.
Twitter and my blog are both set to UTC -3…
(Excuse my english,
)
@Horaz
Seems I identified the required change to prevent this from happening… Will ping when an update is available.
I must be doing wrong, It imports the same tweet up to five times.
Hi, It wont work for me. The plugin imports the same tweet up to 10 times. What should I do?
rgds Marie
@Marie
That issue was not reported earlier… I sent you an email a while ago to get further details…
Can I show the imported tweets as a widget sidebar?
@Lara
The imported tweets are regular WordPress posts. If a sidebar widget can display posts it will surely display your imported tweets. By itself, Tweet Import does only import tweet. No built in widget is included in the plugin.
I tried myself a for a while but couldn’t do it. Is there a way to replace the author name for the title? Maybe the next version could have an option of what the user would like the titles to be for example
1. Short version of the post
2. Twitter Name
3. Author name
4. put in something like {Author name} Twitter {Date}
Anyway this is just a suggestion. I just want the Author Display name if possible to be the title.
@Skyper
Replacing the Title with something else can be easily hacked… use the ‘the_title’ filter in the get_the_title() function to change the returned title. (read this) for a similar concept.
Guido Rovers on May 17, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Hi There,
great plugin, Keep up the good work !
I only have one question, I’m looking for a plugin and thought this would be the one, which puts the TWEETS of the same twitter account in different catagories..:-) Just a little bit different then this plugin…
I’m using a “closed” Blog for managing Projects, this ninvolves also a “closed”twitter account under which only authorized projectmembers can tweet… These tweets meet in the same blog but I want them to be put in de right catagory (a catagory is a Project for me), for instance by @test1 or @test2 for catagory test1 and catagory test2…
Is this possible ?
thanks in advance ,regards,
Guido
@Guido
If I get your requirements right, you would like to import @test1 to a test1 category and same for test2 and other Twitter accounts, then Tweet Import is the right plugin for you. You can import multiple Twitter accounts each to a different category… Furthermore, if you use #hashtags to differentiate projects, #hashtags can be added as tags to created posts…
Hope this helps
Hi Skinju, is it possible to update the frequency the tweets are imported? From what I understand about Twitters rate limits is that we’re allowed to 150 request per hour. So I think the frequency could be adjusted. (I’m following some news accounts, and having more frequent updates, would in my case be better).
On a sidenote, occasionally the tweetimport_twitter_author gets imported as the whole tweet. I haven’t found a pattern yet why this happens though.
@Skinju
Hi again, thanks for the answer but I probably misled you with my explanation…:-)
I don’t want the tweets from different twitter accounts in different catagories but tweets from the same twitter account in different catagories.
My suggestion with @test1 was an example how somebody tweets in the same twitter account and wants the message to be in catagory test1. Perhaps hashtags or another “trigger sign” could realize this…
thanks in advance…
regards,
Guido
@Guido
It is an option to have #hashtags added as tags for imported tweets. I believe this does the trick for you.
I’m trying to update the frequency the feeds get updated, I changed the value for everyquarter in the phpfile. That however only seems to update the time settings in the adminpanel, instead of importing the feeds more often. Any suggestions?
@Dinho
Tweet Import does cache the Twitter response to prevent unnecessary calls to Twitter APi in case something went wrong. I updated the plugin to allow changing the caching duration using a built in filter. Check out this hack for the details. http://skinju.com/wordpress/how-to-change-the-frequency-tweet-import-runs
Just noticed there was a new upgrade available. You’re my hero…runs off to test it!
@Dinho
Let me know how it goes
I installed your widget on my WordPress 2.9.2 site, and get the following error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’ in /homepages/42/d241350541/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/tweet-import/tweet-import.php on line 347
I’ve looked over that section, but I don’t see a problem with it..
The line, as I see it:
echo ‘Assign ‘ . get_userdata($account['author'])->user_login . ‘ as the author’;
@Robin
Thank you for bringing this up. Unfortunately, very few reported this issue previously and, no matter how much I try, I cannot replicate the same error on my end.
So if you, or anybody else for this reason, can grant me access to the backend of a WordPress installation that has this problem, I will try to check and come up with a suitable solution. For this, I will need access to both the WordPress admin area, and an FTP account to be able to edit the plugin and troubleshoot the system online.
@Robin
Thank you for setting up a test environment to solve the parsing error. The issue was identified and solved and version 1.3.1 should be working fine now.
The issue was due to the fact that PHP 4 (which some hosts still run) does not allow method chaining on objects returned by methods which PHP 5 supports. A workaround was needed and it solved the problem.
@Dinho
Let me know how it goes
Really good sofar. I have it running every 5 minutes for some days now at a testsite, that follows quite a big list of people. Haven’t hit the rate limit (btw read somewhere the limit will be upped to 1500 request in the near future. Allowing for even more frequent updates, that is, if the server can handle it.
). So nothing but positivity over here!
The only thing that I haven’t solved yet, is how to get the auto-tag plugin working with tweetimport. It works fine after editing imported tweets, just not on importing tweets.
@skinju : sorry for the late answer, I was away..
In responds to your answer “It is an option to have #hashtags added as tags for imported tweets. I believe this does the trick for you”, I’m not sure what you mean ?
I can enable the #hashtags but how do I get these then in the right catagory ?
The option “Category for imported tweets” only lets me put the tweets of the configured account(s) in a specific catagory…but not all the tweets from that same account into different catagories on base of a hashtag or something else…?
thanks in advance,
regards,
Guido
@Guido
If I get it right, you would like to assign categories dynamically based on tweet content instead of tags. Well, currently there is no option to have dynamic category assignment based on tweet content. Why are tags not an option for you? I mean, you can import the tweets to different tags where tags are project pages and not categories. Would that work?
Lol, (kinda) fixed the autotag problem from my previous comment. If anyone else wants to try it; I did it by removing the add_tag references from Tweetimport.php. It’s on your own risk though. Maybe Skinju can comment on any issues that I might not have thought off (with my limited knowledge).
@Dinho
Seems there is still room for more improvements… In theory there should be no conflicts… Will look deeper and let you know
Skinju, I think Guido means want to import tweets into multiple categories. So instead of selecting one category, being able to select multiples categories. So for example a tweet about soccer could be posted into the sport category and into the soccer category. Would be a usefull feature.
About changing to autotag; it seems to work fine after some days. Just lost the ability to autotag hashtags…but that’s not weird
@Dinho
Thank you for clarifying the multiple categories option… Not sure how reliable would automatically triggering for categories is… Will think about it!
As for the autotag, I believe there is a solution to having both plugins work together… Stay tuned for an update
You’re welcome
As for the autotag, I believe there is a solution to having both plugins work together… Stay tuned for an update
That would be really good news!
@Skinju, Dinho
Thanks for cooperating on this…:-)
Tweets in Multople choosen catagories would be great as well…. But I would be happy if I could get the tweets from the same twitter account into different catagories by somekind of “hashtag for instance.
I’m investigating if I can use Twiiter and WordPress for Project Management. I have 1 twitter account where everybody who is authorized (projectmembers) can send tweets about different projectsitem even for different Projects. Within the blog I want those tweets in certain catagories depending on the projects these tweets are about.
I have a project called “project 1″ so I make a catagory “Project 1″ and want all the tweets about Project 1″ in the catagory “Project 1″.
How this is done is the actual question? This could be by starting a tweet with “@Project 1″ for instance so “something” will trap “project 1″ and put the catagory “Project 1″ on it in the blog… etc. etc.
thanks,
regards,
Guido
@Guido
#hashtags will get the tweet tagged with the #hashtags as tags. Why aren’t tags an option instead of categories?
Anyway, if I may, I suggest you do not use 1 Twitter account for all project managers. Maintaining this account and making sure only allowed users have access given the dynamics of a team… I do not want to be doing that
What you can do is create a list on Twitter. Every project manager will have his own twitter account. All PM’s can be added to a list on Twitter and Tweet Import can be configured to import this list.
All project managers will use #hashtags as using @project1 is actually referring to a @project1 user on Twitter and I wouldn’t take that risk. They would rather use #project1.
I would also use Tags instead of categories. Tags are dynamically added as projects are added and would require no category maintenance.
My 2 cents anyway
Another question: can tweets like the one below be stripped out of linebreak? (breaks the layout) Secondly the tweet below is an example of a case where the entire tweet gets imported as the tweetauthor. Probably my poor mans solution would be to limit the number of charachters a tweetauthor can have.
—————————————————– > the tweet
@Dinho
The plugin does not change the actual content of the tweet, but I am sure there are other techniques to prevent wp from rendering a line break in the output.
Second, the tweet author is anything in the beginning of the tweet between the @ and the : characters
What if the tweet is deleted from wp and imported again… will it be imported with the same issue?
Thanks for the reply. I can indeed probably find a regex to delete the linebreaks in the_content. Haven’t tried deleting and reimporting the bad entries. (edided them, if I spotted them).
Somehow the linebreak problem and the import thingie seem to be related. See fe http://www.twitmedia.nl/?s=verwer&cat=0.
That guy puts a lot of breaks in his tweets, and a lot of his tweets get imported wrong. It’s nothing to worry though. 98% of the tweets gets imported correctly. I’ll try to see if a regex solves and solves the import problem. I’ll let you know.
Oke, looking at the entries again, the problem happens when tweets get truncated by twitter and the 3 dots … get entered at the end of a tweet. Now on to find a regex that removes the …. Or can your regex to strip out the author be adjusted?
@Dinho
I am not sure it is a good idea to strip any content during the import process. I recommend you use regex during the_content display. I heard there is an excellent regex plugin out there and you can give it a try.
I apologize for not addressing your issue, it’s just that importing a tweet is something and fixing some user’s content is something else
Btw; I was just reading up on the oauth apocalypse on june 30th.
http://countdowntooauth.com/ . Will this affect the plugin in any way?
@Dinho
Tweet Import does not require users to authenticate to get tweets from Twitter, therefore, oauth should not have an impact on it
I am getting Last checked on ERROR: Feed Reading Error.
for some feeds.
Is it because of limits of twitter or something else?
@Farhan
=- but I recommend you look into the feed configurations first.
The “ERROR: Feed Reading Error” is reported when the plugin cannot fetch or parse a Twitter configured feed. Limitations on Twitter API might cause this -=not sure though as I never encountered it
i have this installed and running – it tells me 2 tweets have been imported, but there is still only the one post I have ever made – it doesnt appear to be making posts on the front end. My settings…
Assign weem as the author
Import tweets to Twitter category
Tag tweets with:
Make Names clickable: Yes
Tag with the tweets #hashtags as well: No
Make #hashtags clickable: Yes, to twitter
Remove @name Prefix: No
2 tweets imported
—
But like I said, no posts have been created for them.
@theweem
Apologies for being late… This is interesting… don’t the posts show in the admin area?
@theweem
I just checked your website and seems it is working now?
Why did you chose to limit the title to 25 characters? Not very SEO friendly.
@Frode
what do you recommend?
I wanted to shrink 140 chars so 25 seemed a good number
So far Im loving the plugin however there seems to be a problem – when you click the posts title and are taken to the permalink no post is being shown only the 404 page.
Its odd the tweet is imported and displayed on the main page but theres a permalink issue…
Ideas?
@MD
This is not a usual issue with the plugin… as far as I know permalinks are OK… what wp version are you using?
Any idea oh how to get around or do something about those feed error’s.
Do you provide consulting or paid help?
@Farhan, unfortunately I have no bandwidth for a consulting job. Anyway, are you still using the plugin?
Hi
I’m using Twitter Import with a theme that trims the post to what looks like 25 characters. Any idea why this is happening?
Thx
I see now that the 25 is trimming the title. Is it possible to remove the Twitter username from the post title? In other words, remove it from the imported title but leave it for the post itself?
Thx
@Scot
Seems you figured it out alone :p
There is a built option to strip the @username at the beginning of the tweet. I believe this will solve your problem.
This plugin sounds like something I would like to use but I have a concern; I have another plugin running on my site which automatically creates a tweet for every new post with the prefix “New Blog Post:” so if I run Tweet Import then I reckon for all the Tweets it imports to WordPress I believe the other plugin will create another New Blog Post Tweet and this process could continue forever creating an endless series or tweets and posts. Therefore I wondered if your plugin could choose not to import the “New Blog Post:” tweets or give the user an option not to import tweets containing a prefix of their choice?
Also now with WordPress 3.0 what about creating a Custom Post Type specifically for Tweets so that they are completely separate from normal posts. I think this would be a cool idea but I have not seen anyone do it so far!
Just a few ideas here, keep up with the good work!
@Coliin
Can’t the other plugin be configured in a way to tweet only posts from a specific user, or specific category. If so, you can assign a different user or different category for you imported tweets and the other plugin will just ignore those posts.
Thank you for the nice plugin review
You are correct I presume, using a plugin that automatically posts to twitter will cause this ping-pong effect
Hope this helps
Hi,
does this plugin expand the actual tweet or basically post into wp what shows up on the twitter page?
I am looking for a plugin that does what the new flipboard app does on the ipad. It takes a tweet and if there is a link to a page/post it displays that page.
@Ron
This is an interesting question. WP by default does automatically embed videos from youtube and the like. Unfortunately, this plugin cannot process tweets during import and fetch extra content. Way too much work for a background process
Thanks for the Plug In. Just installed it. Hoping to get what I expected.
@Harsh
Thank you… I surely hope it did the job well
Can it be setup to grab tweets with certain #hashtags from any user using the twitter search feature? I tried http://twitter.com/#search?q=GoTRISI but it brings an error. Any workaround?
@Brian
Unfortunately, search is not supported by the plugin. You know, for a background process that is only allowed to run for a very short period, I am not yet convinced it would be a good idea… Sorry
loving it, shukran Khaled
@Nitram
Thank you! willkommen
Shame about not being able to select tweets by hashtag. I understand the potential for abuse, but other than instructing people to use ‘favourites’ there’s no way for me to let employees only post ‘certain’ tweets to my news category. Any change coming in the future?
@Trevor
Sorry
Just installed this and it’s working flawlessly, really well done!
I was wondering if there’s a way to pull in all the old tweets, other than just the newest ones going forward. It grabbed the most recent 20 and has been moving forward from there, can I use it to back-populate the previous entries, creating a twitter mirror?
Thanks so much for this!!
@Brian
Thank you… I am glad it worked for you!
Yeah, there is a way to pull and import old tweets. Nathan Williams, one of the very early users, did find a way and it is all well described with very clear instructions on his tweet archive page at http://www.simiant.com/tweets/.
Is there a way to filter out all @replies from being imported?
@BLueSS
I understand it is sometimes important not to include replies. For the time being, unfortunately, the plugin does not do that. sorry
I would be interested in an option to import weekly and save i.e. into a weekly archive meaning one post per week containing all tweets of the past week?
@ovidiu
This would be an idea for a completely new plugin
I remember I have seen feature in another plugin… Just can’t remember what is was… In similar situations, I consider Google to be a good friend
HI!
I would like to know, If Tweet Import uses the “feed” date?
If Tweet Import uses the original date from the tweet instead of the time the post is created by Tweet Import on WordPress..?
:p
Maybe someone asked that question before.. :/
Thank you : )
@Romain
you are absolutely correct, the post date is the original tweet date and time retrieved from Twitter. Thank you for asking.
Can we filter import based on #hash ?
@Gab
This is becoming a should have feature I guess. Lots of users are asking about that. I might include it in a future release
are you going to update the plugin to support wp 3.1 post-formats? being able to style them under status-update would be great.
@GL
Thank you for the recommendation. Might work on that
I’m struggling with the same error as Farhan.
No tweets imported
Last checked on ERROR: Feed Reading Error.
I can’t seem to fiqure it out. My twitter feed is public so i dont know where to look for.
Ok. It just started working! Sory. I don’t know what happend.
Now its happening again!
@Brat
There should be other issues preventing the plugin from performing as it should. What is the situation now?
I am getting the same issue that @Horaz comments on regarding all of my imports being ‘Scheduled’. Is there a workaround for the difference in time-zones between Twitter and my Servers?
@Tod
I understand this is a big issue. Will surely tackle that in a future release… Apologies for the inconvenience!
Hi, I’d like to import a large number of twitter favorites as draft posts, then be able to edit before publishing. Will your plugin do that, or will the import process automatically publish the imported favorite tweets as new posts?
Cheers,
@Tony
As it is, the import process will automatically publish the posts. I am not sure if assigning the tweets to a “Contributor” user whose default role does not allow publishing would solve your issue. Hmmm, It is worth testing! Let me know if you try that
For some reason I am getting the following error “ERROR: Feed Reading Error”, when the plug in was first installed it worked fine and imported around 20 of my tweets, however it just comes up with this error. Is it because I have set it to check my feed every 15 mins?
many thanks
Thomas
@Thomas
Absolutely not. The 15 minutes interval should be fine. I am surprised
Please keep me updated!
It would be great if you added the ability to filter tweets that contains certain hashtags. I saw your answer to Robin but I don’t mean as a search on the Twitter side. Just an option to only publish Tweets in WordPress that contains a certain hashtag. Example: Only publish Tweets from a specific user that contains the hashtag #news.
I can comment myself before I’m even been moderated. Skinju kindly left a filter to hook into. I wanted to only show tweets from a specific twitter user that contained a certain hashtag. It’s done by adding the following to your functions.php file:
function modifyPost($content) {
if (strstr(strtolower($content['post_content']),”#somehashtag”)) return $content; //hashtag found, publish this post
else return False; // no hashtag found, cancel this post
}
add_filter(‘tweetimport_new_post_before_create’,'modifyPost’);
@Mikael
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m speechless
I have to confess, I have been away for a *LONG* while. I will process your comments, probably for those who might face similar issues after that. Please bare with me… modern life… Huh!
Great plugin, but a query I can’t seem to find
When this plugin is activated, it uses the “home” or “main” page to display tweets
How would one redirect the imported tweets for multiple users to another created page?
I’ve got a “Daily News” feed on the main/home page, and when I activated this plugin, that news feed went 5 pages down…
I’d like to be able to create a page, called Tweets or something, and have this plugin import to that page
Is this possible?
Thanks
Thanks for the plugin..
I have 2 features request
- option to remove links and hashtags from title and shorten titles string.
- option to process links and display them the way facebook does ex. youtube videos, images, website title and desc. ….etc
For some reason, the plugin isn’t importing anything for me. I’ve been tweeting, but apparently the plugin isn’t checking. The settings page says, “No tweets imported – Last checked on (Never)”
Hi skinju,
nice to see you back active again. It seems like the plugin cuts my retweets during import.
Is the length configured somewhere ? Short RTs work fine, longer ones are cut to about 140 chars
Hi,
I’m trying to troubleshoot an issue that may or may not be related to this plugin. I’ve got a twitter feed coming in to the blog and it posts fine on the homepage and can be viewed in the categories page as well. However, if you click on the title the permalink is seriously messed up (shows a repeated URL that is not even the correct permalink sub directory). Any ideas?
Feel free to ignore my previous question. I figured out the problem. My permalink settings were completely wrong.
Hmmm, I’m getting the same issue as some others. Just installed it, and keep getting the “Feed Reading Error” error. Any ideas why it’s doing this? It hasn’t been able to pull in any tweets…
Hi,
I added the plugin and activated it as well as added account in it but nothing happened, How it will add tweets on page or in post or widget?. What should it do or I do?
I am blank. Please help
Vrun
The timezone is not good, is there a way I can hard code it in the plugin’s php?
This plugin looks perfect except for one thing… it would be great to be able to set the title for all imported tweets on a per-feed basis. For example, I’d rather see “Latest tweet from @chrisjscott” as the title of each imported tweet then a truncated version of the tweet itself.
How difficult would it be to add this function? I know I could mangle the PHP and manually insert the desired title by modifying the new_post array, but this wouldn’t help if you’re configuring the plug-in for multiple feeds (which I am).
again excellent plugin, keep it up!
Suggestion for new feature…
In “Twitter Feed Type” option, you could add the possibility of importing “Direct Messages” from the user. (Only for those who give permission)
Hey, this is now importing duplicate tweets. Is there an update?
Thanks
Chalk one more up for setting post-format. Really would like to tag these import tweets as ‘status’ rather than a regular post. Thanks.
I’m not the most familiar with WordPress code but i managed to add a line of code that makes these imported tweets be formatted as ‘status’.
Add this line:
set_post_format($new_post_id , ‘status’);
Below this line on the plugin’s code:
if ($twitter_account['add_tag']) $out[0][] = $twitter_account['add_tag'];
It’s near the very bottom.
Great plugin by the way!
Woah! I’m really loving the template/theme of this site. It’s simple, yet effective. A lot of times it’s very difficult to get that “perfect balance” between user friendliness and visual appearance. I must say that you’ve done a amazing job with this. In addition, the blog loads very fast for me on Safari. Superb Blog!
hello there,
excellent plugin!!
I hope you keep supporting it.
Some new features would be nice =)