Twitter is making major changes in March 2013.

In case you haven’t heard, Twitter is rolling out changes in its API (that’s the techie way of saying they are changing the way one application can communicate with Twitter), so most plugins that display twitter live feeds will have to be updated in order to be able to work.

What is changing in March 2013?

Starting March 2013, all requests to twitter information would have to be authenticated, that means that you will need to basically link your website to your twitter account. For that you will need to create a Twitter application for your Website.

Steps to create a Twitter application for your website

Step 1: Go to My applications page to setup your website as a new Twitter application. If you haven’t already created an application for your website then click on Create an application button

Step 2: It’s normally best to use the name, description and website URL of the website where you plan to display your tweets
you can ignore the call back URL (you don’t need it).

Step 3: Click on Create Twitter App

Step 4: on the following page Click on Create my Access Token

Step 5: Copy the Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret from your Twitter application page into the settings of your Twitter plugin.

All twitter requests are now authenticated and you’re good to go!

If you don’t see any settings to enter these properties in your twitter plugin, that most likely means that it does not support the new changes coming in March 2013.

Cool plugin that will work post- March 2013

In my quest to find a cool plugin that would work post march 2013 I came across Rotating Tweets. I’ve played with it, it’s really easy to setup and can display as a widget or via a shortcode (that’s a piece of code you add to a post or page), you can choose to rotate the tweets by scrolling or fading, pretty cool.

And of course it’s free 🙂 You can check it out here or by typing ‘rotating tweets’ on your WordPress dashboard by going to  plugins/add new page.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to help 🙂