Xavier Media®

Since Twitter enjoy to make life difficult for developers by forcing them to do more advanced programming we got forced to update our WordPress plugin WP-Status.net. Basically the only change in this version of the plugin is updated support for Twitter (if you haven't noticed they turned off basic authentication in their API just to make life difficult for developers). The plugin is still working with Identi.ca and MyXavier.com!

The social community platform StatusNet still supports the old authentication process (thank God for that ) so if you only use the plugin to post to StatusNet servers you don't need to do anything. If you also use the plugin to post to Twitter, then you have to update your account information in the plugin because otherwise you will not post anything anymore to Twitter.

What you need to do to get the plugin to work with Twitter again is to register your site as an application with Twitter (dev.twitter.com/apps/new) and fill in four set of keys in the application (instead of just the user name and password like you did before). When you register your application you need to make sure you set Application Type to  Browser and Default Access type to Read & Write. If you select wrong here you may not get the plugin to work

When registered you get two set of keys: Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. These two needs to be filled in in the correct fields in the plugin. Make sure you copy all characters since if just one is missing or miss-spelled you will not get the plugin working.

Next you need to click on the link called My Access Tokens to get the two other keys you need to use the plugin. These two keys should be filled in in the other two fields in the plugin. Not as easy as before, right?

If you've filled in all the keys correctly you should be able to post to Twitter again. If not check the keys.

Since the above change in the plugin is not really an update (just Twitter-madness), we also added a new feature. It's now possible to also have post suffixes. Previously we had post prefixes (a keyword or hash tag before the post title), but now it's also possible to define something after your post title. You can use both prefix and suffix at the same time or just one of the and as usual you can specify unique values for each server/account

Enjoy the update! To download the plugin please visit WordPress.org.

In the next version we're planning to add support for Oauth also for StatusNet servers (we didn't get it to work properly and since we wanted to release this update we decided to wait with Oauth for StatusNet until next time).

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.