WordPress.org

Who is allowed to post a Tweet from within WordPress?

Anyone who has a 'publish_post' permission. Basically, if you can post to the blog, you can also post to Twitter (using the account info in the Twitter Tools configuration).

What happens if I have both my tweets posting to my blog as posts and my posts sent to Twitter? Will it cause the world to end in a spinning fireball of death?

Actually, Twitter Tools has taken this into account and you can safely enable both creating posts from your tweets and tweets from your posts without duplicating them in either place.

Does Twitter Tools use a URL shortening service by default?

No, Twitter Tools sends your long URL to Twitter and Twitter chooses to shorten it or not.

Can Twitter Tools use a URL shortening service?

Yes, Twitter Tools includes a filter:

tweet_blog_post_url

as of version 1.6. Plugins for this filter may already exist, or you can create your own. The plugin needs to attach to this filter using the standard WordPress add_filter() function and return a URL that will then be passed with your blog post tweet.

Is there any way to change the 'New Blog Post:' prefix when my new posts get tweeted?

Yes there is, but you have to change the code in the plugin file.

The reason this is done this way, and not as an easily changeable option from the admin screen, is so that the plugin correctly identifies the tweets that originated from previous blog posts when creating the digest posts, displaying the latest tweet, displaying sidebar tweets, and creating blog posts from tweets (you don't want tweets that are blog post notifications being treated like tweets that originated on Twitter).

To make the change, look for and modify the following line:

$this->tweet_prefix = 'New blog post';

Can I remove the 'New Blog Post:' prefix entirely?

No, this is not a good idea. Twitter Tools needs to be able to look at the beginning of the tweet and identify if it's a notification from your blog or not. Otherwise, Twitter Tools and Twitter could keep passing the blog posts and resulting tweets back and forth resulting in the 'spinning fireball of death' mentioned above.

Anything else?

That about does it - enjoy!

--Alex King

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress