Importing Your Twitter Timeline to WordPress

The Twitter import tools mentioned in the WordPress Codex do no longer work, because they all rely on the old Twitter RSS feed which is no longer provided by Twitter. This article will explain how to create an independent RSS feed for your Twitter timeline which then can be used to import tweets as WordPress posts.

Last week at re:publica 13 Sascha Lobo presented Reclaim Social, a WordPress based concept, consisting of some plugins and scripts that allow you to mirror and store your content and activities around the web on your own blog. Because I like the idea I wanted to give it a try and installed the FeedWordPress plugin along with some PHP scripts  and duct tape from their tech specs on our new Coworking website.

Here’s how it works

Go to dev.twitter.com and create a new app. After submitting the new app on your application’s detail page click the «Create my access token» button on the bottom of the page. After reloading the page you will find all OAuth settings you need for your Twitter proxy script.

The file proxy/twitter.php reads the configuration from proxy/config.php, so you have to put the customer key and secret as well as the user token (access token) and user secret (access token secret) in the $twitter_oauth_setting array.

// setup your own app here
// https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
	$twitter_oauth_setting = array(
	  'consumer_key'    => 'yyy',
	  'consumer_secret' => 'yyy',
	  'user_token'      => 'yyy-yyy',
	  'user_secret'     => 'yyy',
	);

Once you did that and uploaded it to your web server, you can access the feed at www.yourdomain.com/proxy/twitter.php which is also the URL you have to enter in the Syndication Sites section of your WordPress admin panel.

The FeedWordPress has many configuration settings, but those are documented elsewhere. I had everything up and running in 30 minutes, so it should take you even less with help of this little tutorial.