Improving Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a rather excellent WordPress plugin that adds various Twitter functionality to a blog.

The two elements I use are the automatic posting when a post is submitted and the ability to display your latest Twitter entry. It’s clever in that the latter won’t show the former – i.e. it won’t display on your blog any Twitter entry about how you’ve updated your blog.

There’s also an option to prevent the plugin from display replies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with the single Tweet display and, not getting anywhere contacting the author about this, I set about fixing it for myself.

My main aim here was to not modify the plugin code itself, as any future updates would then break my changes.

First of all, I found the routine that is used to display single Tweets – aktt_latest_tweet. This is a simple MySQL to pull out a post, but with a modificiation to avoid any self-posted entries about the blog…

WHERE tw_text NOT LIKE '$aktt->tweet_prefix%'

I copied this routine to my themes function.php, giving it a slightly different name. I then added the following line after the previous one…

AND tw_text NOT LIKE '@%'

And that was it – all that had to be done to complete this change was to change the relevant theme files that reference this function (or rather the old one).

If changes to Twitter Tools occurs in future, I need to check the original function and ensure it’s not changed – if it has, I’ll need to reflect any such changes in my modified version. Having said that, changes are not common and making any should be quick and painless.