The Twitterfools Trending Topics plugin for WordPress is a simple plugin that adds a widget with a list of the Twitter Trending Topics. You can see it on the right navigator of TwitterFools.com
Unlike some other Twitter plugins, this one caches Twitter data, and provides you with a cache timeout option that lets you comply with Twitter API rate limiting. Caching is a good technique to both improve your site’s performance as well as ensure you don’t go over the API call limit.
Requirements:
- PHP 5.x with SimpleXML extension
- WordPress 2.8
- MySQL 4.x
The current version of the plug-in supports the new WordPress 2.8 widget API, so please update your WordPress installation. Seriously, if you’re running earlier versions of WordPress, you’re missing some good features, as well as better security and code stability.
Installation
Installation is very simple
- Unzip the download file. This should create a directory called “twitterfools-trending-topics” that contains 2 files: twitterfools-trending-topics.php and readme.txt.
- Upload the twitterfools-trending-topics folder containing those two files to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory on your WordPress blog.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Add the trending topics to your sidebar or other area using the Appearance->Widgets dashboard
- Enter a title and a cache timeout value in the widget instance. The cache time out values are in seconds. If omitted, results will be cached for 300 seconds (5 minutes).
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why are you caching Twitter Data?
A: Twitter has a rate limit of 150 API calls per hour for each IP address when those calls are anonymous. We cache the reults of the Twitter trending topics call for an amount of time that is configurable in the plugin dialog. This lets us get around the rate limit issue, as well as improve performance by retrieving the topics from a local cache.
Q: What are Trending Topics
Twitter is a near real-time messaging community, and trending topics are things that many people are currently
tweeting about. In some cases these topics indicate breaking news or popular ideas of the moment. In other cases
they’re still popular, since many people are tweeting them, but the reasons behind why a specific topic begins
to trend was often a mystery. With version 1.0.2 of Twitterfools Trending Topics, user can now roll over
a topic and see descriptive information from WhatTheTrend.com about each topic.
Changelog
Version 1.0.2
- Added Ajax Callout to WhatTheTrend.com to provide descriptive information about each trending topic.
- The Ajax feature relies on the WordPress installation of JQuery as well as SimpleXML Extension
Version 1.0.1
- Migrated to the WordPress 2.8 WP_Plugin API
Version 1.0.0
- Initial production release on Twitterfools.com
Love this plugin?
- Follow us @twitfools
- Tweet about the plugin
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I could see where this plugin would be very useful for many blogs!
great news, thanks for it