I use the very excellent Twitter Tools plugin to automate tweets from posts and the such. However the recent changes to the Twitter API and the resulting update from Crowdfavorite caused a few issues for me.

Firstly, after entering my API application data and then connecting to the Twitter via the Twitter Tools admin page, I would just get a blank screen. The API data was saved when I went back to the admin screen, but posts weren’t auto tweeting as expected – so there was a definite problem somewhere.

My server error logs showed the following, pointing at either something with Twitter Tools or the server setup:

Call to undefined function curl_init() in /home/.../wp-content/plugins/twitter-tools/twitteroauth.php on line 201, referer: .../options-general.php?page=twitter-tools.php

A bit of searching on the net and it appears that the cURL library is not installed by default with PHP5. Thus the Oauth module was not available and the plugin could not establish a connection.

To get this fixed, it just involved installing the PHP5 module and restarting Apache.

sudo apt-get install php5-curl
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I tried validating the API data again through the admin screen and it made a successful connection and then able to set the options as I originally expected.

Being on a VPS allowed me to fix this quickly but if you run into the same issue and are on shared hosting, check with your hosting provider to get this fixed.