Future Development…
I thought I would outline my thoughts on how I see Twools moving forwards. It’s currently available for free and that will continue to be the case. I’m developing it internally but my feeling is to move over to GitHub once it has been developed a little more and the code cleaned up a little.
Both versions are available via my website when you sign up. I’ve done this because I wanted to build up a community and (to be frank) beef up my mailing list. However, I have no issue if people unsubscribe at any time. Once I move the code over to GitHub I’ll probably start thinking about putting Twools for WordPress in the WordPress directory.
I’ve really enjoyed working on the project- although I’ve been building websites and developing other projects for the past 10-12 years, I’ve never released an app and certainly never built a WordPress one. It’s been a great way to learn loads of new stuff and meet some cool people like everyone in this community.
I have some ideas for developing Twools in the future. There are some “biggies” like extending to Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps other social networks. The issue here is that Twools relies heavily on a PHP Wrapper script for Twitter and there isn’t one that I’ve found for LinkedIn or Facebook. If you know of one or would be happy to develop one then let me know!
Twools is mainly read only- it provides data for you to do something with. The exception to that is the experimental DM filter. Twools could be extended to actually do something with that data- send tweets, delete tweets, block users etc.
However in the short term my aim is to debug and clean the code so that is ready to go on GitHub. As well as that I want to extend Steams so it has some of the same output filters and functionality as the Feed Generator. I’d like to improve caching too but I’ll have to think about that one. I also want to add more filters and output manipulation. Let me know if you have any special requests. I may not be able to implement them all, but it would be useful to know. I’ll open a new thread for ideas.
