Twounter is a WordPress Plugin that fetches the number of followers for a twitter profile and returns it in plain text format. Twounter uses Twitter API to ensure that the plugin provides the maximum speed while fetching the number of followers.

Installation:

1. Download the plugin
2. Extract the zip file and upload “twounter” folder to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory
3. Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress

Usage:

• Use the <?php echo twounter(‘username’) ; ?> function in your template files to show the number of Twitter followers. (replace ‘username’ with your Twitter user name)
• use the twounter shortcode [twounter]username[/twounter] in post/page editor to return the numbers of followers for the username.

Since the output is provided in simple text format, you can use CSS to style it anyway you want, and put it anywhere you want. Think of the possibilities!

Plugin Details:

• Plugin Version: 1.0.1
• Wordpress Version: 2.7.1 (please let us know through comments if the plugin works on other versions)

Changelog 1.0.1

1. Twitter API is limited to 100 calls per hour. Twounter now caches the number of followers for 5 minutes. (Thanks to ThePokerJerk for ponting this out.)

Planned Features:

• Chicklet support.

Please don’t hesitate to suggest us more features for the plugin. We are always looking for suggestions and appreciate you for sharing your ideas with us.

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This post is written by Muhammad Haris. You can follow him on twitter @mharis.

As a blogger, you can connect to your commenters by letting them share their Twitter profile when they comment on your blog.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the commenter provides URL to their twitter profile in the website URL field, and you can add a link to a cute little icon with “Follow Me!” text right next to their comment?

So today, I’ll teach you how to add that kind of functionality to your WordPress blog.

I’m going to use the cute twitter icon offered by Function to demonstrate this technique.

1. Download the icon pack and add it to the images directory of your theme.

2. Now, we need to check if the URL in the comment URL field is linking to a twitter profile. We will do this by using regex.

Add the following code under the callback function of comments if you’re using wordpress 2.7 or under the comments foreach loop if you’re using wordpress 2.6.

If you’re using wordpress 2.7, add the following code below $GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment; line.

        $link = $comment->comment_author_url;
	$match_twitter = preg_match_all('/(.*)(twitter)\.com\/(.*)/i', $link, $matches);
	if($matches[2][0] == 'twitter' && isset($matches[3][0])) {
	  $link_to_twitter = true;
	}

3. $link_to_twitter variable will be true if the comment URL contains twitter profile URL. We can use the value of $link_to_twitter variable to add markup for twitter icon if it returns true. Following is an example of how I used $link_to_twitter variable to add twitter icon below the comment author name if it returns true.

        <p class="author_name"><?php comment_author_link(); ?></p>
        <?php if($link_to_twitter) { ?>
        <p class="author_name twitter"><a href="<?php comment_author_url(); ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/imgs/twitter_48.png" /></a></p>
        <?php } ?>

4. Now you can style the markup depending on your design.

I used the above example on Flexis (this feature comes pre-installed in Flexis). The screenshot below shows the outcome of the this technique.

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This post is written by Muhammad Haris. You can follow him on twitter @mharis.