Connecting Twitter to Your WordPress Site

If you are using WordPress to build your educational site, one of the things you might enjoy is the large community that is out there right now developing new tools. An important part of today’s social networking technologies is the emergence of Twitter. As a teacher, you may want to use Twitter as a means to communicate with your students and parents – a way to announce projects, assignments, or even more creative ways to bring content into your classroom.

Let’s say you use WordPress to build your class website. You post an entry about a homework assignment that is due a week from today. Maybe your students will see it, maybe they won’t. It depends on how well you establish a procedure for students to check your site for updates. If you wanted to post this entry into Twitter, and transmit it to your “audience” of students, you would have to enter all of that information in again – in 140 characters.

The purpose of technology is to make life easier, not more complicated. So, what if when you posted that entry it automatically transmitted to Twitter for you? There is a plugin for that, it is called Twitter Tools by Crown Favorite.

What this plugin does is adds an extra feature to your blog post inside WordPress. Whenever you post an entry, it gives you the option to add a hashtag too, not only sending your entry through the Twittersphere, but also attaching a hashtag you can reference.

In order to install this plugin, follow the normal procedure for install – go into your administration backend and under Plugins navigate to Add New. Once there, type in Twitter Tools into the search, find it and install.

Once you have installed Twitter Tools, navigate to its settings – you will need to create an app through Twitter’s API registration before you can use the new plugin. Follow the instructions given to you by Twitter Tools – enter in the correct information once you have completed your registration at Twitter and then save. You should have gotten a notice saying you connected to Twitter and you are good to go.

There are a few options you should consider before fully unleashing your Twitter Tools plugin on your site. The plugin gives you the option to create a tweet from your blog post – you should click Yes as, after all, this is why we want to integrate the plugin in the first place. You also have additional options such as the ability to create a blog post, or entry, from each tweet you send out. Now, that also includes any tweets you may transmit under your Twitter ID – so consider if you want those tweets appearing with the rest of your blog’s articles or not.

Archiving Tweets, Extending Use of Twitter Tools

Here is a great opportunity to examine an extended use of this plugin. Archiving tweets is practically non-existent at this point. You can only go back so far to see what tweets were done when, but they gradually disappear from public view. In order to organize these, and even archive them, you can use Twitter Tools as a means to do just that. Why? Let’s say a student claims to have never seen a post or a tweet about an assignment. If you have Twitter Tools set up to create a blog post for every tweet, you can simply look through your archive and point it out to the student.

Ok,so you want to add that functionality, but you don’t want your blog littered with entries of tweet postings. You want to exclude the tweets from your entries. Well, there is a plugin for that, too! It is called Simply Exclude and what it does is, it allows you to exclude entries from certain sections of your site. It has the flexibility for you to determine which entries will be excluded bases on Categories, Tags, Authors, or even Pages. Just install, as we mentioned earlier for Twitter Tools, and you should have an extra area for Simply Exclude on your admin dashboard’s menu on the left.

1. First, in order to properly index your tweets on your site, let’s create a Category called “Twitter”. This way, any tweets made through your site can be placed in that category. The reason why we are doing this is so that when you use Simply Exclude, you can simply exclude entries from the front of your blog for the category “Twitter”.
2. Next, look for the Simply Exclude menu on the left, expand it and look for the Exclude Category section. Under Front, make sure you check off Exclude so that it will only exclude any categories you tell it to. (Otherwise, if you leave Include checked, it will only include categories that you designate it to and if you forget to do that, you will have nothing on your front page!)  Make sure you find your Twitter category and check of Exclude From…Front. This way, no entries that come in under “Twitter” will appear on the front of your site.

There are still even more options for you through Twitter Tools. You could create a daily or weekly digest of your tweets to archive on your site as well, just configure under your Twitter Tools settings under Experimental. This way you can have all your tweets archived by day or by week, just depends on your preference.

So, you can link your Twitter account to your WordPress site in order to kill two birds with one stone – now you can post an entry on your site and have it automatically fed through Twitter. You can even extend the functionality of the Twitter Tools plugin to archive your tweets on your site for future reference and you can further customize how those entries appear by using the Simply Exclude plugin. Enjoy, you tech savvy teacher you!

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