CUNY Academic Commons

Rowena,

Lets get a little background on your social networking plugins. We can use this issue to not only get twitter working but maybe even streamline a little.

You're currently using Social, Twitter Tools and Twitter Widget Pro. Is there a reason for the overlap? Do these plugins all offer features that you can't get without combining them?

It also appears that Social needs you to reauthorize your twitter account. I of course don't know your twitter password so I can't help there; but if you could try and reauthorize Social it could help us get twitter integration working more effectively.

If you're not using one or more of these plugins let me know and we'll get rid of whatever you don't need.

Finally, could you please verify your Twitter Consumer Key and Secret? (they're listed on the Twitter Widget Pro admin settings page and should be available from twitter by logging in and looking for "Apps" in your profile) PLEASE DON'T POST THEM HERE. They are secret and should stay that way. If you want to send them to me so I can verify them in the admin please email them to me: humanshell@gmail.com.

If you're comfortable with the idea, you can give me your twitter password to try and speed things along. You can always change it once we're done.

OK, as I'm sure you know, the easiest way to troubleshoot a problem is to remove anything that might be interfering and then add things back one at a time. With that in mind I disabled Social and Twitter Tools as you said you weren't using them and you weren't sure why they were even activated. I then focused on Twitter Widget Pro. It took me a little while to figure out but there was one piece of info missing from the settings on Twitter's end. Every time you connect with Twitter externally, they create an "app" to store the settings and permissions associated with that specific connection. The app that was created when you first authorized Twitter Widget Pro was missing a piece of info called the "Callback URL." This is the address of your blog, and it tells Twitter where to redirect you after you've successfully authorized from both ends of the connection. What this meant was that we couldn't complete the re-authorization from the WP Admin. As soon as I added your blog's address to that specific app's settings the re-authorization went through with no problems.

The Twitter widget is now displaying in your sidebar and you can edit its settings on the widget's admin page if you wish.

Please let me know if there is anything I missed. If it's working the way you want it to, I say we leave the other two plugins disabled for now and close this issue. If you need further help with setting up additional social features on the blog, please open a new ticket and we'll get it taken care of.

On a separate note: we are actively trying to move blogs away from the Atahualpa theme (your current theme). It is a very old theme and its developers are not keeping up with the rapid changes to WordPress' internals. It's not that the theme is unsafe or a security threat, it's just not as advanced as some newer themes that are becoming available. For instance, Atahualpa is not "mobile friendly," it isn't responsive. If you would like me to compile a list of some more advanced, modern themes that are available to you, let me know and I'd be happy to put a short list together. If there is a theme that you've been wanting to switch to but is not currently available on The Commons, let me know and I can review it and install it for you. Or, if you would rather just stick with Atahualpa for now, that's fine to. :-)

Thank you so much, Dominic. The Twitter widget displays! and this is the way I would like to show. Thanks!

Yes. I heard the Atahualpa theme might retire in the future. Would you please recommend some new ones for me? I chose this theme because I can put in my own html and css codes to it and I can change the way which I would like to display. Are there any other themes like this? Would you please recommend some to me? It is not a rush - whenever you have time. If you get to this theme, you will see I changed around a lot for the background, the border, the color and space in between the lines.

Thank you so much for this. You may close this ticket for now.