Idea: Twitter API Layer for WordPress

Twitter / Beau: Idea: Can someone please b ...

Automattic built the wonderful Prologue theme for WordPress which turns it into a private Twitter. Coming soon is Prologue Projects, a powerful yet lightweight project-management/monitoring version of the Prologue theme. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could use existing Twitter-tools on a system using one of these themes? Let’s do that.

It seems like it wouldn’t really be all that big of a task to write a layer (implemented as a plugin and/or theme) for WordPress which walked and talked like the Twitter API, but on the backend, interfaced with WordPress. Then you’d just point your Twitter tools (which support specifying a different URL) to your WordPress install and you’re off and running. I could see it supporting the core functionality relatively easily:

  • Public Timeline
  • Friends Timeline (if you added the concept of friends, not that hard)
  • User Timeline
  • Show
  • Update
  • Replies — perhaps showing comments?
  • Update

And what about the Search API? No problem. WordPress has a search system (although it could use some work). In fact most of this functionality would be easily achieved through a custom theme with a little bit of intelligence baked in so that it could output its data in different formats (JSON, Atom, etc) and intercept requests at certain URLs.

The big question is – what’s the point? Well… I dunno… it’d be kinda cool? Apart from being cool – this could also be a very powerful internal business tool, we’ll see where it all goes.

  1. This will be something very useful. Imagine using twitter and wordpress at the same time. The best blogging and microblogging experience coming hand to hand.

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