Notice: Twister is no longer being actively developed or supported.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Twitster?

A: Twitster is an open-source PHP application that makes it easy to deploy a Twitter-based group on your own website. We created the it for three primary reasons:

  • To make it easy for people to collect the tweets from the people they care about for the topics they care about—on their own web site.
  • To let people collect this content on their own website with a minimal amount of work.
  • To let community members contribute using a tool they’re already familiar with.

Q: How much does it cost?

Twitster is 100% open source, so it costs you nothing. Ever.

Q. So Twitster shows the tweets from all my followers?

A. No. Twitster shows the tweets from everyone YOU are following. This lets you control whose tweets appear on your site. You wouldn’t want spammers to follow you and have their spam tweets show up on your site, right?

Q. What’s a hash tag?

A. It has nothing to do with Woodstock. A hash tag is just a way to specify the subject matter of your tweet. Dream up a tag, put the hash mark (#) before it and include it in your tweet. For instance:

I’m the last person left alive on earth. #lonely

Q. Ok, so now that I know what a hash tag is, what’s the point of using them?

A. They can come in handy because tools like TweetDeck, hashtags.org and of course Twitster let you use those tags for stuff like filtering and tag clouds.

Q. Do I have to follow a hash tag? Can’t I just show all of my followee’s tweets?

A. You don’t have to follow a hash tag. Twitster lets you show all tweets from everyone you’re following, so you get a raw, unfiltered feed of tweets on your site. Just leave the hash tag field blank in the setup wizard. Your Twitster page will then look basically like what you see on your Twitter home page when you log in.

Q. Can I filter by multiple hash tags?

A. Not yet. But we’re working on that functionality for the next release.

Q. Can I put Twitster on an existing page, like a sidebar module on my blog?

A. Yes and no. If you’re code saavy, you can probably figure out how to cobble together the code from the index file to create a php include, but there’s no simple way just yet. We’re planning to create a customizable module for the next release that you can easily pull in from elsewhere on your site.

Q. Why aren’t my @replies linking?

A. Username linking should be included in the next release.

Q. Help! I’ve already run the wizard, but I want to change the configuration.

A. No sweat. Just open the config.php file located in your Twitster directory and make the changes. It’s well documented and should be easy to figure out how to change what you need.

Q. Can I see it in action?

A. Heck yes you can! Lots of communities have already brought people together using Twitster:

Reporting Problems

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