Note: You don’t need a plugin for this anymore. Simply paste the link of your tweet in a separate line. WordPress 3.4 added Twitter.com as an oEmbed provider.
As a blogger, do you get an urge to quote a tweet from somebody in your blog post? We know we do. Many bloggers have taken numerous approaches to add tweets in their WordPress blog posts. Most common one that we see is when a blogger simply quote the tweet manually, and add the link to the actual tweet. Another common method is simply taking a screenshot of the tweet. Both of these common methods have a downside. By taking a screenshot, you are making a tweet less interactive specially when it has links and hashtags. If you manually copy and paste it, you loose the styling and it is just a hassle. In this article, we will share with you a plugin, Twitter BlackBird Pie, that lets you add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts by adding simple shortcodes.
First thing you need to do is Download/Install the Plugin. (Here is a WordPress Plugin Installation Guide).
Once you have activated, you are good to go. Yep that’s right, no settings panel, no NOTHING. Simply add links to your tweet in a separate line:
http://twitter.com/#!/wpbeginner/status/2727250491351040
Note: Be sure to remove the space. We had to add it, so it would not execute.
Basically in the first method, you are adding the ID of the tweet that you find in the URL at the end. Or you can add the entire URL. Once you add this shortcode, it will pull the tweet and add an awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts by adding simple shortcodes.
Live Demo of Twitter BlackBird Pie
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Full List of Features of this Plugin
- TinyMCE editor button to easily search and embed a tweet
- Support for the built-in embeds API (oEmbed), so a tweet URL on it’s own line will be converted to a “pie”
- Supports non-english tweets & names!
- Exact same look and feel as the respective Twitter profile.
- Allows for multiple “pies” in a single post.
- Stores the generated HTML in a custom field (if possible), so the Twitter API is only called the first time.
- The Custom fields used to store the tweet are hidden
- Slightly better styling than the original Blackbird Pie
- Better use of the Twitter profile background image and color and tiling.
- Uses the Twitter profile text color.
- Uses the Twitter profile link color.
- Dates are displayed like on Twitter i.e. “real time” datetime of when the tweet was tweeted.
- Auto-linking of URLs, hashtags, usernames within the tweet text.
- Use either the id or full URL of the tweet.
We hope that you will utilize this plugin to embed actual tweets in your WordPress Blog Posts to make it more interactive rather than taking screenshots or manually copying and pasting the text.
Thank you! That was exactly what I was looking for!
Thanks to a new feature in the Twitter API, you can now do it in an even easier way with the Tweetable plugin. http://www.webmaster-source.com/2011/12/21/easily-embed-whole-tweets-in-your-blog-posts-with-tweetable-1-2-4/
And it’s going to be in Core for WP 3.4.
Does this work with wordpress.com blogs or just .org? Sometimes these features don’t work on the com blogs so worth asking? Also because the link goes through to .org.
@digireado This works fine with WordPress.com as well
You don’t even have to install the plugin.
Well, even better! So, er, am I missing something? How do you do it without the plug in?
@digireado You simply type the tweet’s URL in a separate line by itself.
Outdated. Blackbird Pie works in an “oembed” fashion, you can embed tweets just like YouTube videos — insert the URL on a separate line in your post or page content. Also, there’s a lightweight plugin called Twitter Blockquotes you can check that out as well
@kovshenin Updated the post… You still need to have a plugin activated… just don’t need the shortcode.
Cool! There’s a few things left though: “Note: Be sure to remove the space. We had to add it, so it would not execute.” and the paragraph after that. And also a tip regarding printing shortcodes without executing them in WordPress, use double square brackets, like this [[gallery]]
The one thing I continue to dislike about BlackBird Pie is how terrible it looks in an RSS feed. So much of the formatting is lost. At the moment this is a deal-breaker for me.
Hey Andrew,
The new version of blackbird pie (0.4) solves the long standing issue of terrible looking tweets in RSS feed readers like Google reader. They now look sexy
This is quite a cool solution, thanks for highlighting it.
I’ve been making use of WP QuoteTweets plugin for some time now and this plugin achieves the same, great result. It beats the pants off having to screenshot every Tweet you want to reference.
Such a neat plugin, already done my first post using it…
http://stuartwooster.com/wiki-description-oops-a-daisy
Awesome stuff, thank you!
Thank you. I was really tired with that twitter screenshot thing.