WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform today. It’s solid as a rock, fast, easy to use, has a great user community, and it’s a cinch to customize. WordPress can be extended to do all sorts of tasks through its plugin API, and there are literally thousands of WordPress plugins available. As we were building twitterfools.com, we looked at lots of Twitter plugins for WordPress. Let me say first that there were hundreds of Twitter plugins to choose from. Since there are too many to list here, we decided to present a list of ten great Twitter plugins for your WordPress blogs. Please enjoy:
Twitter Widget Pro
Twitter Widget Pro is all about displaying a twitter feed on your sidebar. This is a well-written plugin, and the author, Aaron Campbell, has some great support information on his site. In addition, TWP is designed to allow you to change the CSS, which will let you seamlessly integrate your twitter feed into your site.
Digg Digg
We use the Digg Digg Plugin to show the Digg and Twitter (or TweetMeme) buttons on each post. You can also show Reddit dzone, and Yahoo Buzz buttons as well. The plugin provides a nice administration features, and for twitter, you can configure it to post replies with any @ name you choose.
Twitter Counter
Need social proof? Twitter counter is one of the best sites out there for tracking how many followers you have, and the Twitter Counter plugin lets you display your follower count proudly.
TwitMe
We’ve used Johnny Mast’s TwitMe for a while, and really like it. It lets you tweet whenever you publish a new blog post, and you can also tweet about earlier posts as well. The admin page also adds some value, since you can use it as a twitter client – right in your WordPress Dashboard. Be aware that TwitMe requires that your PHP distribution has Curl installed.
Tweet Blender
Tweet Blender provides a plugin and widget that blends Twitter tweets from multiple sources. The widget appears in your sidebar and can be configured to “blend” tweets from an author, several authors, as well as for one or more hashtags. The plugin also automatically adds a tweet archive page.
Commentwitter
Commentwitter gives your readers the option to post their comments to Twitter. Tweeting comments makes them available to be followed on Twitter clients as well as on your blog.
Twitter Publisher
Twitter Publisher also allows you to automatically tweet when you post a new blog entry. Unlike some others, this will use bit.ly or Awe.sm url shortening services. It also can embed Google campaign variables in your links, giving you better visibility of your Twitter clickthroughs in your Google analytics console.
Tweet
There’s something refreshing about a simple name like this. Along with the simple name comes a simple idea. The tweet plugin isn’t a Swiss-Army knife, it’s a laser scalpel. It’s got one purpose, automatically linking @ names and hashtags to Twitter. See, wasn’t that easy? Check out @lantrix for more info.
My Twitpics
Twitpic.com is the de-facto standard for linking tweets to images. The My Twitpics plugin creates a sidebar widget that displays a thumbnail gallery of your twitpic creations. We think this one is very slick.
Capture The Conversation
The developers over at Pointfire have … um … a point. For any post on your blog, there is likely to be much more social reaction and conversation occurring on twitter than there is in the blog comments. The Capture the Conversation plugin lets you bring that conversation back into your blog posts – maybe not so much where it belongs – but certainly where its easy to see some of the context that you lose in a Twitter stream.
If you’ve got any other plugins you want reviewed, you should drop a comment or just let us know @twitfools.
