There are many services to shorten links, including one supported by WordPress, but if you have a great short name domain, best thing to do is to have your own service to shorten links. And to power it, best solution available is YOURLS and its WordPress to Twitter plugin.
YOURLS system and plugin are developed by Ozh Richard based on the idea by Lester Chan. I will not go into details about it, it is easy to set up and use, and you can find the link to get it at the end of this review. Main thing here is the other part for this system, plugin to bring the URL shortening to WordPress.
Plugin is very easy to set up. Install it as any other plugin, and open its settings panel. There are 3 different things you need to set up, and options are well documented. You first need to set the shortening service. You can use public services: bit.ly, tinyURL and is.gd. And you can use your own YOURLS installation. Once you do that, you need to set up the Twitter account. This is also well documented, and it requires setting up the Twitter Application that will be used to sent tweets through. After that, you need to set up the template for tweet message and options to generated short URL’s for different post types. You can set for each post type if the plugin should sent tweet automatically.
Tweet template support number of tags that will be replaced to generate tweet: author (name and all other user data), custom meta fields, category, tags, taxonomies and post elements. When the plugin is active for selected post types, you will get a meta box on the post editor panel where you can see the generated short URL, you can request new short URL and you can see the generated message, and send it manually to Twitter.
Over the past several months I have contributed to the plugin code with support for custom taxonomies, several bugs fixed (including AJAX powered themes like P2 auto tweet problem), made changes in generating hashtags from terms and few other things. Also, GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro has integration support for this plugin, and you can set for each post type different tweet message and control options for generating short URL and sending tweet message.
This plugin is a great solution for generating short URL’s regardless if you use your own installation for YOURLS shortening service, and to send messages to Twitter with control over templates and auto tweeting. I use this plugin on all my websites, I use my own shortening service and I highly recommend you try the plugin for yourself and see how easy it is to use, and how much it will save you time to get short URL’s and to send tweets.
Useful Links
Ozh Richard Home Page: planetozh.com
YOURLS Home Page: yourls.org
Plugin on WordPress.org: wordpress.org
GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro: dev4press.com
