Please Update Your Themes – Twitter Widget Deprecated

11 years ago  •  By  •  0 Comments

Twitter has now finally deprecated it’s API, so all existing custom twitter widgets will cease to function. I’ve posted update notifications on the forum post about for the last  3 months, and it appears to finally have happened.  Due to these changes, I needed to decide between two options to add a twitter feed to your site:

A. Create a custom twitter widget with their newer API. However, to do this, each user (that means you all) needs to register their own “app” with twitter, there are new rate limits for the api (no more than 150 views in an hour per IP) and the style must exactly match the twitter guidelines: https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements which basically look identical to twitter’s own widget. Once you register your App, twitter would need to approve it, and there are 4 different codes you need to generate an plug into the widget to get it to work (Twitter Application Consumer Key, Twitter Application Consumer Secret, Account Access Token, Account Access Token Secret). Even if you go through all this, the widget will essentially need to look and function the same as twitter’s own widget, but with lower rate limits. As you can see this is a usability nightmare for you all, with no design benefit that I can see.

B.  Use twitter’s own built-in timeline widget. Twitter’s timeline widget doesn’t have any rate limits (you can view it as many times as you like) and you can customize the colors, height your theme. I believe this is an easier, better solution for everyone.

We’ve decided the best course of action is to use Twitter’s own Timeline Widget to display your twitter feed on the site.

To add your twitter widget:

1. Visit twitter.com/settings/widgets. You should be logged into the Twitter account from which you wish to display your latest tweets.

2. Click “Create New” within the Widgets section. The “Configure a user widget” page will appear.

3. Under Options, enter the site URL in the Domains section. You can also select an alternate Link Color (it will default to blue).

4. Select the “Create widget” button and a line of HTML code will appear in a text box to the right. Copy this entire line of code and paste it into a Text Widget on your site. You can place the Text widget with your code in the widget area where you’d like the latest tweets to appear.

More detailed documentation and instructions are located in the documentation included with your updated themes. Be sure to check out the live demo of your theme for how this twitter widget looks and functions.

If you need additional help, just give us a shout!

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