Wordpress Twitter Tools replacement

May 23, 2012 6:17 AM

I've been using Twitter Tools on my Wordpress blog for a while now but it's not working the way I want. I tried using the newer beta version but that doesn't actually work at all. There's like a million Twitter-related plugins for Wordpress but which one(s) does what I want? Details within.

I'm running v3.3.2 of Wordpress. Twitter Tools v2.4 works, but won't include the hashtag when I use the "Press This" bookmarklet. If I want to include or change a hashtag, I have to go into the Admin interface. It looked like the Twitter Tools beta would allow me to add a hashtag (or any other random text) but it didn't actually work at all, unfortunately. All I want to do is have Wordpress send a tweet when I post, I'm not really interested in creating posts from tweets or anything similar.

What would be ideal is the ability to have a per-post hashtag field on the bookmarklet along with the default (as well as have the default included). The sidebar widget of Twitter Tools is nice but I can easily do that in other ways. Is there something that does this buried in the Plugin Directory, or am I stuck with Twitter Tools?

posted by tommasz to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: Any chance you are willing to move out of Wordpress plugins for this? I have used both Twitterfeed and HootSuite for this in the past. These are both free. You just give it the RSS feed from your blog and it will tweet every time there's a new post, including title and descriptor if you want. You can set custom text (including hashtags). You can also use a URL shortening service which can help you catch usage statistics about who's clicking on the link from Twitter, if that is helpful.
posted by aabbbiee at 7:32 AM on May 23, 2012

Best answer: You might be able to get it to work via ifttt. You'd create a recipe along the lines of "if new wordpress post then new tweet" - I've created a sample - as long as your post only has only cateogry or tag, it'll use that for the per-post hashtag. Hacky, but it should work.
posted by neilbert at 12:25 PM on May 23, 2012

Best answer: On the weekend, I read this review of WP Tweets Pro. No experience with it, but it is a paid plugin, which hopefully means support is decent.
posted by backwards guitar at 12:39 PM on May 23, 2012

Response by poster: WP to Twitter, which is the free version of WP Tweets Pro seems to be able to add the hashtag when I use the bookmarklet. I'll probably keep that until I can figure something out that allows a per-post hashtag.
posted by tommasz at 3:32 PM on May 23, 2012

Best answer: I've been using WP to Twitter for while and it allows me to add additional hash tags within it's window for each post.
posted by spacelux at 9:42 PM on May 23, 2012

Response by poster: And I added a task to my ifttt to fire on a particular category/tag that does the one hashtag I use other than my default. It means I'll have two tweets for the same post sometimes but that's a minor issue for now.
posted by tommasz at 7:59 AM on May 24, 2012