Twitter is huge, so huge I don't even need to tell you this right now unless you have been living under a equally huge rock for the last 6 months (or longer). In today's article I am going to be listing 6 kickass Twitter extensions for the Joomla! CMS. 3 of these extensions are totally free, the other 3 are not. But don't worry I will let you know what ones are free and which ones are not.

But why would you want Twitter on your website? Really the question is why would you not want Twitter on your website. There are so many reasons to have it on your website, here is a few. Twitter is a great way to promote yourself, and your website(s). In some cases in replaces RSS feeds with quick and easy updates in less than 140 characters to all your followers. Having a "Tweet This" button on your website or blog is one of the smartest things you could do right now with all the link sharing going on with Twitter.

1. RokTwittie

RokTwittie provides a means of transporting the various aspects of Twitter, such as your tweets, your profile information and plus much more, into your Joomla. Perfect for any site with a Social edge.

The configurability of the module is its best feature, allowing you to choose which aspects you wish to show which can result in a short, contracted module or a full page of tweets, searches and information. Tweak the Twittie to your liking.

2. Yootweet

Show users what you're up to! The YOOtweet module is the neatest way to display your Twitter entries directly on your website. Its high performance is outstanding: We designed it for highly frequented websites. All displayed tweets get cached so they show up super fast. To choose which tweets you want to show you have a lot of options that you can also combine: You can set a user name whose tweets you want to display, to only show tweets to a user you're writing to or tweets that contain a certain hash-tag or a specific word.

3. Tweetme

Tweetme is a Joomla 1.5 Native plugin that adds a nice "TweetThis" button to your Joomla articles. Its very simple, lightweight and looks good on any site.

When your users discover content on your site and tweet about it, it will boost your site traffic.

The plugin provides a fully integrated URL shortener and the story or page’s title. Each link which is posted on Twitter adds increments to the count on that story/article. The more tweets a story receives, the more popular it is! The compressed files are only 4kb and 10kb uncompressed, all the action happens with one small line of javascript.

What Inspired This? Most similar plugins support submitting your content to many Social Networking sites, while having it's obvious advantages, a plugin like tweety that may add unwanted scripts to your site or require you or your Client having to either edit xml files or  sometimes making complicated configuration settings or adjust CSS files. Something that your client may not appreciate or understand. A recent project required a 'Tweet This" link in articles that would enable site visitors to tweet/re-tweet an articles Title and link. There was no existing Joomla modules or plugins that fit the requirements for one or the other reasons, thus Tweetme was born.

Where did it come from? Tweetme relies on the API provided by Tweetmeme.

4. foobla Twitter application

foobla Twitter application provides comprehensive solution to use Twitter inside Joomla.

It allows you (or Joomla users) post Tweets directly from Joomla instead of go to Twitter website or using Twitter Desktop Client.

It also provides Twitter Module, Social Bookmarking with Twitter support, auto updates Tweets when you add article, VirtueMart, Eventlist, Jobline, DocMan, ... (add-on installable),...

5. BizTweet Lite

BizTweet Lite adds a multi-user Twitter page to your Joomla! website.

With BizTweet Lite, anyone in your organization can post to the same Twitter account!

This a fantastic way to allow anyone in your company to post to your company Twitter account, without requiring users to continually log out of one account before logging into the company account.

BizTweet Lite can display your friends time-line, your personal time-line and any tweet that mentions your @username.

BizTweet Lite also supports the tr.im URL shortening service to save on valuable tweeting space.

You can configure BizTweet Lite to prepend a tweet with the logged in user's name so it's easy to tell who is the most active 'tweeter' in your company or organization.

6. Tweetboard for Joomla!

Tweetboard for Joomla! is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what's being discussed.

Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.

That will finish this post. If you guys have a kickass Twitter extension for Joomla! that I didn't list here please post it in the comments and let us all know about it!

About the Author

Adrian Balkwill is a web designer and a user interface designer for a software/web design company located in Canada, he is also the founder of Blogfullbliss. It is his goal to make Blogfullbliss the best source on the web for design/technology related articles and tutorials.

Subscribe to our RSS Feed! Follow Adrian on Twitter!