Twitter Tools 2.0 and WordPress 2.8.6 Issues
I’ve been using Twitter Tools for a number of weeks now, automatically having some of my Twitter posts displayed on this blog. However I noticed today that they had stopped working. I knew that I had changed my Twitter password recently and realised that I had forgotten to change it in Twitter Tools. No problem, this can be resurrected easily enough I thought.
Except that it wasn’t.
Every time I entered the new password, and tried to test the connection, a message was being returned from Twitter first of all saying
Sorry, login failed. Error message from Twitter: This method requires authentication
and after a few attempts:
Sorry, login failed. Error message from Twitter: Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 150 requests per hour.
I couldn’t find anywhere on my Twitter account settings > connections panel to do this (and indeed there never was an indication here that Twitter Tools had access anyway). I tried to de-activate the plugin and re-activate it, but this didn’t help (hey it’s always worth a shot).
So like everyone else these days, I Googled it and found that many people have had the same issue recently. Each post I found had people suggesting different draconian methods of fixing the issue, different ones seemingly working for different people, but there was one difference : they were all for earlier versions of WordPress, and not the latest 2.8.6. Eventually I found one blog post by Shekhar Govindarajan on the integration between WordPress and Twitter whilst also providing a solution to the problem that I was having. I will post here what I did, taken from his suggestions:
- Take note of your Twitter Tools settings
- Deactivate and delete the Twitter Tools plugin
- Take a backup of your database (just in case)
Delete all the Twitter Tools related options from the database table (the deletion above does not do this) from the WordPress options table, probably called
wp_options
which is the default setting, but it might have a different prefix, depending on your setup when you first installed and set up WordPress; using the following MySQL command:delete from wp_options where option_name like 'aktt%';
Reinstall the Twitter Tools plugin (I simply did this from the WordPress plugin dashboard) although Shekhar suggests downloading it and unzipping it yourself
Activate the plugin
Enter your Twitter username and password and test the connection. It should work fine (it did for me)
Set your settings back to whichever way you had them setup prior to deleting the plugin
Hopefully this will solve your problems, and thank Shekhar if it does!