Follow for free plugins, new theme releases and theme news
Plugin Description
Keep your traffic in the family! Host Twitter images on your own site, with support for comments and trackbacks, image
resizing and thumbnailing with Lightbox.
Twitter doesn’t yet come with its own inline image support, so we tend to be limited to using image hosting services,
and linking to them with short URLs. So, services like Twitpic host the image, and we direct traffic to them in return.
Better to take advantage of that traffic, and host images on your own site. This way, viewers come to your site, instead
of someone else’s!
Posted images are displayed in your normal WordPress template, with support for comments and trackbacks, without any
setup required. Most themes should work with this, but if not, or if a different layout is required, a custom theme template
can also be provided (see ‘Creating a Template’).
Provides an HTML form for posting image content, as well as an API modelled on that of img.ly,
compatible with Tweetie (for iPhone) and any other Twitter clients that speak this protocol and offer configuration of
custom image hosting services.
Uses Twitter’s authentication and a list of authorised accounts, so you can let others use your image host too. You can even
post status updates to Twitter while submitting images.
Provides a widget and shortcode to display uploaded images. This supports filtering by Twitter account, styling with CSS,
and Lightbox/Thickbox.
Widget
To use the widget, simply visit the Widgets page and drag the “Twitter Images” widget into a sidebar and configure it.
Shortcode
Shortcodes are snippets of text that can be inserted into pages and posts. These snippets are replaced by various generated content.
Twitter Image Host provides a ‘twitter-images’ shortcode to display images you have uploaded within a page/post.
Available parameters:
count Number of items to display
id Single ID (eg 'abcde') of one image to display, or multiple IDs separated by commas (abcde,fghij)
view Image thumbnail view: squares, proportional, large or custom
custom_thumbnail_width Custom width for thumbnails, when 'view' is 'custom'
custom_thumbnail_height Custom width for thumbnails, when 'view' is 'custom'
custom_thumbnail_crop Whether to crop custom thumbnails
author Comma-separated list of Twitter account names to limit results to
columns Number of columns of images to display
lightbox 'true' to use Lightbox/Thickbox
Example:
[twitter-images columns=4 lightbox="true"]<h3>PHP function</h3>
As well as the shortcode, you can also use call twitter_image_host_images() from within a template to
produce the same output. Pass the same arguments as the shortcode as associative array values:
<h3>Recently submitted images</h3>
<?php twitter_image_host_images(array('author' => 'ATastyPixel', 'columns' => 6, 'lightbox' => true)); ?>
Tip: Use this in the twitter-image-host.php template (see ‘Creating a Single Template’, below) to display
other posted images when viewing an image. Use the_twitter_image_author() to filter the list, to show
only other submissions by the same Twitter account as the one of the currently displayed image.
Template Tags
This plugin provides several template tags, for use both in displaying single posts (see ‘Creating a Single Template’), and for custom pages which display
many posts in a loop (see ‘Using Template Tags in a Loop’).
The available template tags are:
Single Entry Tags
the_twitter_image_permalink
Returns the URL to the view page
the_twitter_image_url
Returns the full URL to the image, or the image thumbnail if the original image was large
the_twitter_full_image_url
Returns the URL to the full-sized image, if one exists, or false otherwise
the_twitter_image_title
The title of the image
the_twitter_image_date
The date (timestamp) of the image – use date() to configure the display
the_twitter_image_author
The associated Twitter account
the_twitter_image
Returns HTML to display the image and a link to the full-sized image if it exists, with Lightbox rel tags.
Loop Tags
query_twitter_images
Search for Twitter images
Available parameters (passed as associative array):
count Number of items to display
id Single ID (eg 'abcde') of one image to display, or multiple IDs separated by commas (abcde,fghij)
author Comma-separated list of Twitter account names to limit results to
has_twitter_images
Use with loop: Determine if there are more images
next_twitter_image
Use with loop: Get the next image
Creating a Single Template
By default, this plugin will use the standard post template (‘single.php’). However, if you wish, you can create a
custom template to display hosted images. The template should be called ‘twitter-image-host.php’, located within your
current theme directory.
Creating a template to use this information is fairly straightforward if you have just a little knowledge of HTML or PHP:
- On your server (via an FTP program, etc.), navigate to your current theme. This will live within
wp-content/themes.
- Copy an existing template –
single.php is usually a good candidate – and call it twitter-image-host.php.
- Open up
twitter-image-host.php, and delete everything that looks post-related: This usually includes everything between
the have_posts call and the matching endif, and may include some other surrounding content like an ‘Edit this post’ link.
-
Replace that which you have just deleted with something that uses the ‘single entry’ template tags above, like the following:
<?php echo the_twitter_image() ?>
<h1 class="center"><?php echo the_twitter_image_title() ?></h1>
<p class="center">
From <a href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"><?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?></a>
on <?php echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?>
</p>
-
Save the file, add some content (see the ‘Posting Images’ section), and see how it looks.
Using Template Tags in a Loop
Just like the WordPress Loop template tags, the template tags provided by this plugin can be used to display multiple posted entries.
This can be used to create a custom page template that lists all submitted entries, with more flexibility than that offered by the shortcode.
Use begins with a call to query_twitter_images(), possibly with an argument to configure the search. If the result is true, then the loop begins,
conditional upon has_twitter_images(), and starting with next_twitter_image() to load the next entry. The single template tags can then be used
to customise the display of each entry.
Here is an example of use:
<?php if ( query_twitter_images() ) : ?>
<?php while ( has_twitter_images() ) : next_twitter_image(); ?>
<div class="item entry">
<div class="itemhead">
<h1><a href="<?php echo the_twitter_image_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php echo the_twitter_image_title(); ?></a></h1>
<div class="date"><?php echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?></div>
</div>
<?php echo the_twitter_image() ?>
<p class="center">From <a href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"><?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?></a></p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
<p>There are no Twitter images.</p>
<?php endif; ?><h3>Posting Images</h3>
To start posting from your WordPress blog, select the “Twitter Image Host” menu item from the “Posts” administration section.
Enter a title for your image, select your image file, hit Submit, and you will be given the URL for the image. If you wish
to tweet straight from this facility, you will need to follow the instructions from that page to set up the plugin.
To access this facility from an application, use the access point displayed on the Twitter Image Host options page under “Settings”.
The API is more-or-less the same as that of TweetPic, img.ly, etc.
To post from Twitter (Tweetie 2) for iPhone, visit Twitter/Tweetie’s settings, and within Services, Image Service, select ‘Custom’, then
enter the API URL as listed on the options page.
Making the URL even shorter
If you run WordPress from a sub-directory (for example, http://your-site.com/blog), then the short URLs generated by this plugin will
look like http://your-site/blog/xxxxx. You can remove that ‘blog’ component via a little .htaccess trickery.
Here’s how:
- Create and open a new file in your site’s webroot called “.htaccess”. If there’s one already there, just open that up and prepare to edit at the bottom.
-
Add the following, replacing ‘blog’ with the real subdirectory under which WordPress is installed:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.jpg -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.png -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.jpeg -f
RewriteRule (.*) /blog/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
This will take any requests that:
- Are located in the web-root (start with a slash, followed by anything but a slash until the end)
- Have a corresponding file within Twitter Image Host’s content directory
Then, it’ll rewrite the request silently to the real Twitter Image Host URL, without the viewer seeing.
- In Twitter Image Host settings, set the ‘Override URL Prefix’ option to ‘http://your-site.com/’
Credits
German Translation: Walter Güldenberg
Screenshots
No screenshots provided
