With some helpful info I found at Perishable Press, I was able to fix two issues I had with the HL Twitter plugin for WordPress 3.0.x.
For me these were:
- Long URLs were breaking themes in the sidebar widget (if you are guilty of tweeting long URLs like me)
- links from URLs were opening in the same window. Now they open in a new one.
To do this just two files have to be changed, hl_twitter/functions.php and hl_twitter/hl_twitter_widget.php.
Easy one first: hl_twitter/hl_twitter_widget.php
- copy the hl_twitter_widget.php file into the root of your themes folder.
- open the newly created copy in an editor (vi is preferred)
- find the CSS section labeled “.hl_recent_tweets p”
- add in the following to that section of CSS
white-space: pre; /* CSS 2.0 */white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3.0 */white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */white-space: -hp-pre-wrap; /* HP Printers */word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5+ */
- save the file
- done! the url overflow is fixed
Now onto the other easy one: hl_twitter/functions.php
- enter the plugins/hl_twitter folder
- open functions.php in my favorite editor, VI
- change line 178, which should read $tweet = preg_replace(“#(^|[\n ])([\w]+?://[\w]+[^ \”\n\r\t< ]*)#”, “\\1<a href=\”\\2\”>\\2</a>”, $tweet) to the following
$tweet = preg_replace(“#(^|[\n ])([\w]+?://[\w]+[^ \”\n\r\t< ]*)#”, “\\1<a href=\”\\2\” target=\”_blank\”>\\2</a>”, $tweet);
- Save the file and you have completed this part (opens links in new windows)!