Earlier this week, Twitter announced that they are officially turning off version 1.0 of their API. This move has been made in favour of version 1.1 of their API. This version requires authentication for any request made to the Twitter servers, which means that all Twitter applications and code snippets would need to be updated to use this new version. This includes our WooThemes Twitter widgets.
While this has been a hot topic within the development community, with blackout tests being run on the Twitter API over the past few months, we had unfortunately dropped the ball on getting an update out to you all.
Today, we’d like to inform you all about WooDojo version 1.5.3, which includes support for Twitter API version 1.1.
What about WooThemes Twitter widgets?
Since the release of our WooDojo plugin, which includes a Twitter Tweets and a Twitter Profile widget, we opted to cater for these widgets in our themes, in favour of bundling the widget into each individual theme. This means we can work off of a single code base, refine the code more and, ultimately, make updates quicker.
I’m using a Twitter widget that came with my theme, and it’s no longer working- what do I do?
Please use the Twitter widgets bundled with WooDojo instead of the widget bundled with your theme.
How do I upgrade?
If you’re already using WooDojo, an update should be available on the Dashboard > Updates screen within your WordPress admin area. If you’re a new WooDojo user or are experiencing difficulties with the upgrade, you can download WooDojo for free from our website. This update includes the new code.
What has changed with the new Twitter widgets?
As mentioned above, version 1.1 of Twitter’s API requires authentication for each request made to it. This is, unfortunately, out of our control.
While the setup process may seem daunting at first, it only takes a few minutes and is a once-off operation.
We’ve compiled detailed documentation on how to set up your API keys with version 1.1 of Twitter’s API.
Once your API keys have been set up, your Twitter widgets will function as normal.
Looking forward with WooDojo
As WooDojo evolves, we are looking forward and working on some exciting updates (based on the feedback we’ve received from you, our community) to make WooDojo work for you. If you have any ideas for items you’d like to see in WooDojo, please add them to our WooDojo ideas board, where the community can vote on your ideas.
As mentioned above, we dropped the ball in getting this out to you all. We hope you will accept our apology and upgrade to WooDojo version 1.5.3, to make use of our updated Twitter API integration.
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Good work (at last!). Slight typo in the blog though.
“Since the release of our WooDojo plugin, which includes a Twitter Tweets and a Twitter Profile widget, we opted to cater for these widgets in our themes, in favour of bundling the widget into each individual theme.”
Do you mean:
“we opted to cater for these widgets in our *plugins*”?
Hi rwintle. I’ll clarify. 🙂
Prior to WooDojo, each of our themes included a Twitter tweets widget, bundled into the theme’s code.
Since WooDojo’s launch, our newer themes no longer include a Twitter tweets widget, yet cater for WooDojo’s tweets widget with custom styling to make the widget fit with the theme’s design.
I hope this clarifies that point a bit better. 🙂
Matty,
The problem I have with Woo not fixing the “old” (if you call something that was used in Dec 2012 version of Canvas and later as old) Woo Twitter widget is that I have this widget integrated and custom styled into Canvas themes for clients. If I switch to the Woo Dojo Twitter widget, now I’ll have to go back and restyle them to match the site and then charge my clients.
Thanks for your feedback.
While I agree that it’s not ideal, it’s important to note that the construction of the Twitter widget that was bundled in our older themes is significantly different to that of the WooDojo Twitter widget.
This distinction is important to note, as it dictates how the widgets function, when interacting with the Twitter API. The widget in Canvas, for example, works with JavaScript and relies on the public data, which is now no longer available.
Having all themes using the same Twitter widget (in WooDojo) makes the product far easier to scale and, if changes like this pop up, it’s a far quicker duration from when the change is reported to getting the fix out to everyone.
With that all said, the WooDojo Twitter widget’s markup was modelled on the markup used by the older Twitter widgets in our themes. This should, at least, ease the transition process.
Our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused. The API change is, as mentioned above, out of our hands, unfortunately.
Thanks Matty for taking a moment to explain. I understand that moving forward, it will be easier for Woo and Woo theme users to maintain and update themes with a single code base and WooDojo Twitter. This, however, does nothing for those of us who are using the Woo Twitter bundled with the Woo theme. Again, I’m not talking about themes that Woo made 5 years ago, I’m talking about a Woo theme (Canvas) that I used as recently as March 2013 to build a site and now that component is not working. I find it unacceptable that Woo cannot come up with a patch/ fix for Woo Twitter widget to comply with the Twitter for everyone using this widget bundled with their Woo purchased theme. You admitted yourself that Woo knew this change was coming for months and dropped the ball. It’s very uncool for Woo to pass this off to us to change plugins and charge clients for the change, not to mention how we look as your customers when our clients call and ask why their feeds are broken. I expect better of Woo.
Thanks very much, again, for your feedback. 🙂
It’s important to note that the very heart of that widget is no longer supported by Twitter. This is, unfortunately, something that is outside of our control. Adding all the logic we now have in WooDojo into every theme (Canvas included) is impractical and an inefficient use of resources (nor does it scale for you and the community in the long-term).
As mentioned above, the move towards WooDojo for Twitter widgets was made at the launch of WooDojo. This has been a trend that we’ve worked towards and, admittedly, we should have completely removed the Twitter widget from Canvas at that stage. This is something that we will be doing going forward and is the by-product of growing pains where we are looking to strip functionality out of themes, such as our “Features” and “Testimonials” plugins (as they say, he-insight is 20/20).
To clarify, we recommend using WooDojo’s Twitter widgets instead of those bundled within themes. While this is certainly an inconvenience (particularly in the scenario you’ve laid out) in the short term, the long-term benefits are evident.
I’m happy to discuss further, if you’d like. If so, please do send through a ticket for my attention and we can pick up the conversation there. 🙂
Thanks, again, for your time and this healthy conversation. 🙂
Thanks for the speedy fix. Can’t deny it was a bit late, but glad it came. Thanks
Thanks for sorting this out. This is a really disappointing change on Twitter’s part, and I’ll be interested to see how it affects them.
Perhaps I spoke too soon. I followed the instructions for setting up my API key, entered the values in the appropriate locations in the WooDojo settings, and the widget still doesn’t work. Any ideas?
Just to be sure you are using the WooDojo tweets widget, and not the themes bundled widget?
If you’re definitely using the WooDojo Tweets widget, I’d advise logging a ticket with our help desk, where our ninjas can assist further. 🙂
I have gone in and refreshed the woothemes automatic updater on a number of my sites and do not see the update for woodojo 1.5.3? I have also gone into managewp and tried it and refreshed and nothing? I know I can do this manually but when the number of sites in over 100 then this is not really an option – any ideas on how this might be happening?
Thanks for reporting this. We are aware of this and are inspecting the issue further. 🙂
I’m really glad to see the functionality moved out of the themes in principle, but I don’t use the majority of the WooDojo stuff, so would really like to just install a WooThemes compatible social widget.
Thanks for your feedback, Sandie. We’ll keep this in mind. 🙂
+1 for not using all the WooDojo stuff just to install one widget.
I’ll add my voice here for separate plugins verse the Dojo/Jetpack approach. I’m concerned about the emergence of these mega packs that load unneeded plugins to sites.
JetPack is worse than DoJo for sure but I fear the trend leading to a “Balkanization” of WordPress plugins that can not be good in the long run for WordPress.
I wholeheartedly agree here. Requiring users to add yet one more plugin that comes bundled with a load a functionality that is not needed, not to mention unwanted Woo branding on whitelabel installations, is a complete deal breaker and makes me genuinely concerned that Woo is growing less and less concerned with developer needs in favor of their own branding heavy solutions.
Please, please, PLEASE bring back the simple solution of bundling a simple twitter widget into the themes.
These “surprise” style decisions are a major problem for those of us who use Woo on numerous client sites and I really though we were past all of that with some of the growing pains from 2012.
Drew
The latest WooDojo is not available for automatic update at the moment – I downloaded manually and replaced and it’s working fine.
I migrated my Canvas CSS – the WooDojo widget appears to use more of the Canvas Theme CSS than the built in Widget ever did 🙂
I put a short guide here on the changes I needed to make to update my Canvas CSS – http://www.mayne.net/woodojo-twitter-widget-for-twitter-api-1-1-and-css-migration/ – I hope it helps someone out.
Thanks for posting this. Your tutorial is clear and provides enough detail to help someone on their way to customising the WooDojo Tweets widget.
Thanks. 🙂
What about the sites that require multiple Twitter feeds? I didn’t see a way to add multiple API keys.
Do you actually need individual keys for each user? Or can one API key suffice?
You only need the one set of API keys. 🙂
When adding the WooDojo Tweets widget, you can specify the username to display tweets for, in the widget’s settings. 🙂
How about for sites that use themes like Currents (http://woocommerce.com/products/currents/) with Author Profiles pages? Before the API change when you clicked on “View all posts” by the author it would have a little Twitter Feed to the right of their bio. That’s blank now.
This is a poor solution. Just what I want, to add more bloat to you already chubby theme framework.
Any chance someone can come-up with some code snippets and a simple walk-through to replace the 1.0 functionality. I understand that every theme is different, but anyone who is savvy enough to care should be able to figure it out with a bit of direction.
Hi James.
This solution, in fact, removes bloat from the theme, as the Twitter code would be separated out from the theme.
This is a solution that is future-proof, as well, as the code is centralised and outside of the themes (ie: you can switch themes and use the same Twitter widgets).
Just a few small clarifications on the reasoning behind this solution. 🙂
The time-ago tag is human_time_diff’ing Twitters UTC timestamp against the server local time… so the comparison is wrong.
We’ve changed the current_time(‘timestamp’) call in widgets-woodojo-tweets.php to current_time(‘timestamp’, true) to ensure the diff is UTC vs UTC 🙂
If I need the same markup in this new widget as there was in the old Twitter widget bundled with Canvas for consistent styling purposes (namely the DIV with a class of “back” around the UL and P but not the H3), is there a way to go about doing so that doesn’t require editing the actual plugin file and therefore makes it update/upgrade proof?
Is there some sort of caching in the WooDojo Twitter plugin? I’m using the updated WooDojo and it worked yesterday, but today is doesn’t return any tweets.. Any ideas?
Cheers, Maarten
If you don’t want to download and install WooDojo and all the unneeded Dojo widgets just to fix Woo Twitter, then I can recommend this plugin that works well with Woo Canvas:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-twitter-feed-widget/
You still must follow the steps in the guide above to get the secret keys, but after that it is pretty easy to drag the plugin into your sidebar/footer. You can style it with this:
.really_simple_twitter_widget li {}
Hope that solution will help someone.
Will this still work?
http://support.woothemes.com/entries/22501301-Add-a-Twitter-Feed-to-your-Header
This code uses the Twitter V1.0 API code, so no, you’d need to call the “the_widget()” function and use WooDojo’s Tweets widget instead… or a third-party plugin that has Twitter shortcodes/functions built in that are designed for use outside of widgets. 🙂
Here isn’t a update for WooDojo in the update section for any of my web sites.
Please Advise,
Thanks
Same issue as cagecafe, no update for WooDojo is showing up in updates?
Yeah we were wondering why our twitter stopped working! Twitter seemed to have screwed alot of folks on this one! Some of my twitter plugins have stopped working also! When something is working they leave it be! This is costing me much work 🙁
Hi,
I updated manually Woo Dojo and created the API keys as indicated.
I replaced the widget, to use the new Woo Dojo twitter widget.
I initially thought it was working fine.
But in fact the twitter feed widget is only showing **very old** tweets. Few weeks old.
Is there some caching in Woo Dojo ?
How could I debug this ?
Well, don’t mind, keys copy-paste error … 🙂
It is working fine now.
I have install Woo Dojo update, and configure it, but don’t work for me 🙁
I try it with two differents accounts.
What can i do?
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0ad1fyzn68
Why doesn’t WooDojo have an auto update notification? Is this expected? Basically the twitter thing broke my clients site and had no idea there was an update needed.
Why doesn’t WooDojo have an auto update notification? Is this expected? Basically the twitter thing broke my clients site and had no idea there was an update needed.
(also fyi — after submitting a comment i was redirected to the comments-php file…)
Question, one of my site uses Canvas, and the tweet region of the contact template appears blank, what can I do to make it work again?
I am also seeing this problem. On WooDojo 1.5.3, the profile widget works but the Tweets widget does not. In fact anything after the Tweets widget is also hidden/does not get loaded.
I have the same on my site, is there a solution yet?
Still no automatic update for WooDojo? Making it a bit of a faff to update multiple client sites, to say the least.
Also running WooDojo 1.5.2 on a bunch of sites, and I see no update notification for 1.5.3. I’ve seen WooDojo update notifications in the past, but not lately.
ditto.
Though I had no trouble installing and activating the WooDoJo Twitter widget, I’m having a terrible time with styling. Our tweets are not displaying correctly and I can’t figure out how to make them look like what I think they should look like. We’re using the Headlines theme. Can anyone take a look here at http://stcatlanta.org/posts/news/ and point me in the right direction? Notice the Twitter feed in the sidebar. I know this is a CSS styling problem, right or no?
Replacing the widgets as described with WooDojo is OK and the instructions here are fine. But it’s not clear how to restore the single display of tweets for example in Sealight, where in the theme options >layout options there is a field “Twitter Username” which does not work even with the latest framework and theme option.