Glad I finally found this

After seeing other plug-ins or parts of plug-ins that attempted to do more or a lot more and were abandoned, I was very pleased to run across this one, first through a google search that led me to the developer’s blog, and then finally to the WordPress plug-in. I’m not sure why it hadn’t found it earlier – could have to do with keywords in the plug-in description.

So, I’m giving it four stars because it works as advertised, and because I had been on the verge of giving up on the project of creating an automatic or semi-automatic Twitter digest, or kludging together bits and pieces of different ones. However, I agree with the earlier reviewer that it would benefit for more settings options and perhaps from a template-based approach to formatting the output, and I also encountered some difficulties or unclarities during installation that would be worth clearing up.

For now, I’ve hacked the main file to add additional css classes, while trying to preserve the plug-in’s naming style. I’ll suggest at least that much of a change to the developer and sees if he feels like implementing it.

On installation I encountered two problems: 1) Conflicts with other plug-ins using variations on the same OAuth routine borrowed, apparently, from Twitter Tools; 2) problems with setting up the necessary Twitter App that were further complicated by recent Twitter policy changes that will affect a minority of users without a Twitter-white-listed mobile phone number.

On #1, I didn’t need the conflict-causing plug-ins, so de-activated them, but it could be that the class that can’t be “re-declared” could be written in a way that avoids conflict instead.

I bring up the second problem less because I expect a lot of other people to run into it specifically (for all I know Twitter itself will modify its policy sensibly by the time I’m done writing this review), than because it touches on an issue that the developer brings up in his notes. He suggests, but unclearly describes a method for people setting up the application with other runs running. I found that I could simply re-use a working Twitter authentication code for a different app. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t go away.

Well, didn’t mean to write this much: My main message is, great plug-in, and I look forward to working with it further.