My first WordPress plugin, HL Twitter, was released six months ago and at the time of writing is just a few downloads under 5,000. So it was about time it got some much needed love!

First of all, some major bug fixes have gone into the recent releases. This fixes some issues caused by Twitter’s move to Snowflake IDs on 32-bit PHP installations. Other areas have also being cleaned up in general, making the system more robust and flexible.

Onto the new features. The biggest addition is support for Archive pages, you can view mine here. Archives are just what they sound like, a fully browseable and searchable history of every tweet HL Twitter has saved. And just like widgets, you can change how these pages look just by adding a file to your theme.

Useful for those who like quoting themselves and others, you can now embed tweets within posts and pages on your WordPress blog using shortcodes. Just use [hl-twitter] and you can be flashing those tweets all over the net.

Finally, the widgets area was updated for those who aren’t using dynamic sidebars. Why you wouldn’t use those provided by WordPress I don’t know, but now you can put widgets wherever and however you want!

And that’s a wrap, for now at least. All of this wouldn’t be possible without the continued support of the WordPress community. Every bug report and feature request has contributed to the continued development of HL Twitter and luckily most of those I have spoken to have being amazingly nice and understanding people. Cheers WordPress.