Twitter Mentions as Comments WordPress Plugin

TL;DR: Twiter Mentions as Comments does exactly what it promises to do – scours Twitter for people talking about your blog posts and silently inserts their Tweets alongside your existing comments.
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Twitter Mentions as Comments does exactly what it promises to do – scours Twitter for people talking about your blog posts and silently inserts their Tweets alongside your existing comments. The plugin leverages the power of WordPress’s built-in commenting system – notification, comment moderation, author white/black listing – making Twitter an extension of your blog.

Features

  • Searches for Tweets linking to your blog posts, regardless of the URL shortener used (using Twitter’s Search API)
  • Pushes Tweets into WordPress’s existing comment workflow – notifications, comment moderation, and author whitelists/blacklists work just like any other comment
  • Fetches user’s real name and profile picture and links directly to the original Tweet
  • Checks automatically – no need to do a thing
  • Option to automatically exclude ReTweets
  • Option to store tweets as trackbacks/B
  • Option to specify which posts to check (for example, 10 most recent posts, all posts, front page only)
  • Smart Caching of Tweets and user data – retrieves only what it needs to save on API calls and server load

Planned Features

  • Dynamic resizing of Twitter profile images to fit WordPress theme
  • Prioritization of newer posts
  • OAuth Authentication to raise API limit (currently unlimited Tweets, but limited to 150 new comment authors per hour)
  • Smarter API throttling

The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository, and you can see it in action below or on the WP Resume plugin page.

Looking to filter out a particular user or keyword? Because Tweets go through the normal comment filter, you can just blacklist them as described below.

Update (7/8): Comments have been closed in favor of expanded support and discussion options. Additional documentation about the project can now be found in the Project Wiki. If you are interested in joining the project at any level of technical expertise, please see How to Contribute.

Originally published November 29, 2010 | View revision history

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benbalter

Ben Balter is the Director of Hubber Enablement within the Office of the COO at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform, ensuring all Hubbers can do their best (remote) work. Previously, he served as the Director of Technical Business Operations, and as Chief of Staff for Security, he managed the office of the Chief Security Officer, improving overall business effectiveness of the Security organization through portfolio management, strategy, planning, culture, and values. As a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development. More about the author →

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