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#wcdfw09

Last weekend I attended WordCamp Dallas 2009 with a few guys I work with. After using WordPress for several years I felt it was time to go to my first WordCamp. It ended up being an awesome time. Heard from some great speakers and learned some interesting things. Although this WordCamp seemed to be a little more focused on the blogging/community side of WordPress there was a few good technical speakers. It was also nice to hear about the community aspect as its something I’m not familiar with enough. I fully look forward to next year.
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WP-TwitterSearch Released

Recently I was working on a project at work where I needed to display search results from twitter on a WordPress site. Although there are a ton of great plugins for displaying your own twitter feed there was none that did what I needed for search. So, I started looking around at other rss wordpress plugins but that still didn’t render exactly what I needed. So, I started working on my own plugin just for twitter search. The plugin is available for download now from the WordPress Plugin Repo.

The Now

I released the first version over the weekend and an update shortly after. It currently works as a widget or a template code to allow you to use it anywhere. The options page lets you set what keywords to search twitter for as well as how many tweets are shown. You are also able to specify a username to limit the search to. I’m not sure how handy the username is right now but its there for a future feature (read below). The plugin displays an unordered list of the tweets returned leaving you to style however you wish. This plugin came about from a project that I needed it for so it may not be what your looking for.

The Future

The first feature I would like to add is the ability to tie it into your posts via The Loop. Basically you would add the template tag to your post loop and it would do a search for tweets you have made that include the tags you set for that post automatically. So, for example if you have a blog post about SXSW with the tags ‘austin sxsw’, it would do a twitter search with your username for those two tags and return any tweets you’ve made that match those. Kinda like a ‘tweets related to this post’ feature.

Another item on my to do list is to let you exclude tweets. For example being able to exclude @replies or ReTweets or tweets that were automatically posted (for example via twitterfeed, facebook, etc). I would also like to add the ability to let you include several search feeds in your template (if that would be useful to anybody). You would specify the options in the template tag or in the widget itself instead of an options page in that case.

Problems?

If your having problems with WP-TwitterSearch or would like to suggest a feature then you can either leave a comment here, email me on the contact page or post on the WordPress.org forums as I’m always hanging around there. You can also comment just to let me know how useless this plugin is or in the rare case that its what you were looking for.