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How do I display a tweet in my post with Shortcodes?

HL Twitter supports supports displaying tweets within a post or page using Shortcodes. To do so, use the following tag:

[hl-twitter]

By default, this will show the most recent tweet as found by HL Twitter. To change this you can use the following options:

• num: the number of tweets to display (optional, default 1)
• tweet: the ID of a specific tweet e.g. for http://twitter.com/Username/status/123456 use 123456 (optional)
• user: the Twitter ID of a specific user, this can be found in the URL on the edit user page in HL Twitter (optional, not needed if using tweet_id)
• search: will show all tweets that match the specified search term (optional)
• year: show only tweets made in this year e.g. 2011
• month: show only tweets made in this month e.g. 3
• day: show only tweets made on this day e.g. 27

Examples:

• [hl-twitter search="football" num=5] Show the first 5 tweets mentioning football
• [hl-twitter user=12345 year=2011 month=3] Show a single tweet from this user in March 2011

How do I change the Widget/Archive Page/Shortcode?

Please look look at the Installation tab which shows how to override the default styling in HL Twitter without losing your changes on each update.

The link to Twitter button is stuck on loading / never loads?

You must make sure that your server supports cURL, and more explicitly multi_curl, in PHP. Due to the unique nature of each server I can't give more specific advice, so Google is your best bet to get more information.

Why can I only import 3,200 tweets?

Twitter currently limit access to only the 3,200 most recent tweets for an account. If they increase this limit, HL Twitter will also increase.

Why aren't all my tweets being pulled in?

Twitter limits applications to a set number of requests per hour. If you are tracking a lot of people you may hit this limit before HL Twitter has finished importing all new tweets.

How do I enable auto-tweeting?

Auto-tweeting, having HL Twitter tweet a new message whenever you publish a post or page, is disabled by default. To enable it go to HL Twitter -> Settings in your WordPress admin. You can also change the default text that is shown in the tweet. When publishing a new post or page, you will not be able to choose whether or not to tweet for this post.

The Tweet Archive page doesn't load

WordPress sometimes fails to load the link to the Twitter archive page, most commonly after installing or updating. To fix it, go to HL Twitter -> Settings and change the Archive Pages slug to something different e.g. my-tweets, then press Save. Finally go to Settings -> Permalinks and click Save there. This will force WordPress to check for new links, including HL Twitter.

New tweets are not automatically imported after the initial import

HL Twitter uses the internal Events system to periodically check for new tweets, unfortunately this does not work on some blogs. A manual solution is to set up a cron job (or equivalent) on your server. Please note that modifications made to hl_twitter.php may be overwritten by future plugin updates.

• Open /wp-content/plugins/hl-twitter/hl_twitter.php
• Find the line define('HL_TWITTER_CRON_KEY', '');
• Change to define('HL_TWITTER_CRON_KEY', 'my-secret-key'); changing my-secret-key to be a phrase only you know
• Open http://yourwebsite.com/?hl_twitter_cron=my-secret-key in your browser. This will trigger an automatic update. If the page says that tweets were imported, continue, otherwise get in touch with the plugin author via the contact form. (Do not worry if a line says errors were encountered, as long as tweets were saved to the database).
• Add a cron job to your server to load this URL however often you require.

Some of my tweets have the wrong links!

For example: http://twitter.com/Username/status/123456789 displays as http://twitter.com/Username/status/123456000.

This was an issue caused by certain versions of PHP truncating the IDs when it loaded them from Twitter. This was fixed in Version 2011.3.11, apologies to anyone who was affected by this issue.