After6 Gets Its First Twitter Card Accepted

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By Dave Aiello May 16, 2013 4:49 PM | 0 Comments

We were able to get a Twitter Summary Card accepted for OperationGadget.com, one of the oldest Movable Type-based sites maintained by After6 Services.

What's a Twitter Summary Card?  That's the part of an embedded tweet that shows the introduction to a web page or a blog post.

Here's an example of a Twitter Summary Card attached to an embedded tweet, from one of the recent posts on OperationGadget.com:

We think Twitter Cards are as important to driving Twitter click-throughs as Open Graph Meta Data is on Facebook.  If you need help getting features like these working on your site, let us work with you on it.

Implementing Twitter Summary Cards in a Movable Type-based Site

It isn't difficult to implement a Twitter Summary Card on a Movable Type-based single blog website, but when you start scaling up the number of blogs, the number of authors, and so on, you start needing features of Movable Type Pro or Movable Type Advanced.

For example, according to the current documentation for a Twitter Summary Card, you can have Twitter accounts representing:

  • twitter:site
  • twitter:creator

These elements of a Twitter card can be hard-coded in the simplest case where a site has a single blog written by a single author.  But multiple authors need a field associated with the author's identity in Movable Type where the author's personal Twitter account ID can be stored.

Similarly, a Movable Type instance representing multiple "sites" (which may actually relate to blogs or websites in the Movable Type 5 and 6 data models) need a field associated with either the blog or the site itself within the Movable Type schema, so those Twitter accounts have a place to be stored.

The best practices for all of the more complex use cases described above require custom fields at the author and blog levels.  When you need this capability, After6 recommends a solution based on Movable Type Pro or Movable Type Advanced.

Continuing the Twitter Summary Card Discussion

After6 can help implement Twitter Summary Cards and other Twitter Cards on your Movable Type-based site.  If you want our assistance, please contact us at customer.service [at] after6services.com.

If you are a developer or more technical user of Movable Type and you are doing your own implementation of Twitter Cards, we would love to keep discussing these issue with you.  Please leave a comment here or Tweet us @after6services.

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