In June 2016 we announced20 that we would be making it much easier for developers to create embedded timelines on their sites, by no longer requiring the timelines to be registered under widget settings89. We launched publish.twitter.com741 to make it much easier to create timeline widgets without requiring you to make changes to your account settings, and to make the embedded timelines more flexible.
Today, we are announcing the conclusion of that process and discontinuation of support for older timeline widgets that rely on widget settings89.
On May 25, 2018, the widget settings page will no longer allow embedded timeline widgets to be created or edited. From that date, the only (and best) way to create timeline widgets will be to head to publish.twitter.com741. All existing timeline widgets that rely on these settings (e.g. the ones that have data-widget-id in the markup) will continue to function until July 27.
On July 27, 2018, timeline widgets that rely on account-specific widget settings will no longer be rendered. From that time, all settings will be in the embed code itself as ādata-*ā attributes in the markup. We expect timelines to work as expected for the majority of users. Settings previously customised (for example link color and height), will not be applied. The content of the timelines - the Tweets - will be rendered in the same way. The one notable exception will be search timelines31, which will no longer be rendered in the same way, and will fall back to a simple link that points to the corresponding search results on twitter.com. We hope that your search timeline can be replaced with a user timeline30, list timeline23, collection timeline22, or likes timeline which will offer more fine-grained control over what Tweets show up on your webpage. We also continue to offer three tiers of the RESTful Search API21 which can help you transition from the search timeline if you are open to writing your own display code.
To ensure timeline widgets look the way you want, we recommend clicking on the āEmbedā link at the bottom of your timeline, which will direct you to publish.twitter.com741. Here, you can grab the equivalent embed code with all the settings in the embed code itself. This is the recommended way to create timeline widgets going forward. This approach will work for all kinds of timelines except search timelines (these are being retired).
We understand that change causes burden to some developers, and we apologize for this. The web-based widget settings are part of an old internal technology stack, and we want to adjust our priorities to give developers the best overall experience. Weāre continuing to improve the experience for embedded Tweets and timelines, so keep watching for further announcements about new features in the future!
