Twitter Tools 2.0 and WordPress 2.8.6 Issues

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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!