I wanted to make it as easy as possible for my blog readers to directly retweet my posts. First I started to install and test several WordPress plugins for this but I just couldn’t seem to find one that I liked. Some of them are to massive and are showing information about how many and who has retweeted your post, I don’t need that. Other required the Twitter Anywhere connection and the user must accept that the retweet application on my blog can connect directly to their Twitter account, I don’t want to force my readers to do this. I decided to create the Retweet functionality by myself so I would have full control on the behavior. This post will tell you step by step how to achieve this.
First I wanted to shorten the post url by using Bit.ly, I am not a php expert or familiar with the Bit.ly API so I googled and found the php code needed for using Bit.ly to shorten my url. I found a great example at www.devmoose.com in a post called Automatically Create a Bit.ly URL for WordPress Posts. Just follow the steps in the referred post at devmoose.com to achieve this. I did a minor modification to the code to make it work in my WordPress : I added “<? php” before the code and “?>” after the code. I also added the “if function exists” check.
