Chicago Web Design

Here at Blueprint Design we have been trying to figure out which WordPress Twitter plugins we should use to integrate . Here are the results of our research. Look at the end of this post to see what we picked to use. Please note all of these plugins are compatible up to WordPress 2.7. 

1. - This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. Alternative versions by other contributors: Kevin De Mulder: . Jonathan Dingman: . Ceritium: . James Cridland: .
2. -  for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog. Features: Simply, Customizable, Widget ready, Uses Wordpress resources (no extra files needed), No options page (yes, it’s a feature), Detects URLs, e-mail address and @username replies, Multiple widgets (Thanks to )
3. - The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.
4. - TweetSuite adds a server side fully-featured TweetBacks service, complete with a Digg-style “Tweet This” button at the top of each post, a “Retweet This” button for each TweetBack, widgets for your sidebar, and the ability to automatically update Twitter with your latest blog entries.The self-explanatory sidebar widgets (you can customize which ones you want to display) include a Recently Tweeted widget, My Last-Tweets widget, Most-Tweeted widget, and My-Favorited Tweets Widget. That’s a lot of widgets, and they all serve very different, but useful purposes for super-tweeters who want to easily display relevant Twitter content to blog visitors. My personal favorite is the Most-Tweeted widget, which works in the same way as standard Popular Posts widgets, displaying your blog entries that get the most Twitter love in your sidebar. 
5.  - This plugin takes the pain out of adding another field to your comment form for users to enter their twitter username to be displayed as a link to follow them via their twitter page. WP Twitip ID functionality: Adds an extra field to the comment form for user to enter their twitter username, Echo out the twitter id associated with the comment being displayed, Echo out a html link pointing to the users twitter page using “Click Here To Follow Me On Twitter”, Display link as an image, Ouput just the @ username, Return the twitter id as a variable to be used by php, Display html before the extra field, Display html after the extra field, Add a class name to the extra field
6.  - Official Flash or HTML javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter. Available directly through the twitter site.
7. - TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
8. - Twitt-Twoo is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. AJAX takes cares of the hard work, and means that your page doens’t even have to reload, allowing for quick and easy status updates.”This is definitely the most aesthetically-pleasing Twitter plugin for WP to date, but it’s a shame I can’t use it as my host is running PHP4 not 5!”
9.  - Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.
10. - Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites. Features: Unlimited number of feeds. Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two. Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code. Customizable display using stylesheets. Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam. Localization ready! ( translations) Daily digest available to summarize your activities. Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website. 
11. - Lets you ignore posts in a given category so that if you import posts to a special category so it would not flood Twitter. This new option also allows you to have one category on your blog lets say “Twitter friends” and you could tell Twitme to dont send posts from all the other categorys except those in “Twitter friends”. In that case you would mark all the categories to disallow except the “Twitter friends” category.
12. - Submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog (or an existing published entry has been edited). Supports inclusion of a permalink to your blog posting in the tweet.
13. - This plug-in serves one purpose and that is to tweet published posts. It doesn’t do anything other then tweet. It tweets in this format: [your message] [post title] [short url].
14. - People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
15. - MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter status updates (tweets) on their Wordpress site and update their status through the Options page. Includes customization options including number of recent twitters to display, formatting options, and stylesheets. It can be called as a function or used as a widget.
16. - Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted.
17. - A smart badge that shows your Twitter details and who you’re following on Twitter. It shows your friends’ avatars and invites your readers to come and follow you too.

Wordpress Twitter Plugins We Choose

18.  - Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

19.  - This twitter plugin is a sidebar widget that handles Twitter feeds. It’s true that you could just point and RSS widget at one of the Twitter feeds, but you end up with the whole tweet as a link, @replies don’t function, etc. Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. It’s set up like the RSS widgets, so you can have as many of as you want on your sidebars.

After long tedious testing here are the plugins we choose. Although there are many solutions like  which integrate both the ability to show your tweets in a widget on our sidebar as well as posts from your blog to twitter we started by adding to our site which is setup and configured from their site. After that since it was already setup we started searching for a plugin just to display our twitter feed.  stood out from the rest for having a rss icon link to the feed as well as a direct title link (shown as “Follow Us On Twitter” on our page) to our twitter page. Installation was quick and simple and there you have it could you ask for anything more. Our needs were fairly simple. The other plugins above in the post are great for more advanced functionality.