Twitter Widget and Twitter API v1.1

February 28, 2013

Many of you that use the built-in Twitter widget in our themes have probably been experiencing some problems over the past few months. As we’ve discussed in our support forums, these problems have been a result of changes to the Twitter API. Our current Twitter widget code uses v1 of the Twitter widget API, which will be retired March 2013 (next month). This means that the widget will completely stop working, along with many other Twitter apps across the web unless updated to v1.1 support.

We’ve put much thought into how to approach this, and feel the best solution is to phase out the built-in widget in favor of a plugin. That way when API changes do occur, only one plugin will need to be updated, as opposed to 20+ themes. So until we can finish our own Twitter widget, we are recommending that you install a third party widget plugin that already has API v1.1 support. Here’s one that we recommend: Twitget. It takes less than two minutes to set up. Go to Appearance->Plugins->Add New, and do a search for Twitget. Then install and activate. Once activated, go to Appearance->Widgets and remove your current Twitter widget, and add the new one. Then you can change your settings under Settings->Twitget.

If you want to tweak the line-height, it can be done with a little custom CSS:

.simple_tweet_widget li {
   line-height: 1.5em !important;
}