12 February 2011
A co-worker/friend recommended using Twitter Tools for integrating my WordPress blog with my Twitter account, so I thought I would give it a shot. Twitter Tools makes use of a Twitter application that you need to create as a medium for your blog/Twitter communication. After cruising through the process of creating a Twitter app and entering the consumer/access keys required to configure Twitter Tools, I ran into a problem. Every time I would try to hit the ‘Connect to Twitter’ button on the Twitter Tools options page, it would lead to a blank page (and an indication from my browser that the server had returned a HTTP 500 error code). Since there was no error message (of course!), I was clueless as to what was going on or what I was doing wrong. Searching around, I found a WordPress Help Center article describing the same issue I was having and what the root cause was.
The solution was to install/compile cURL extension support into PHP5. If your blog runs on a Linux VPS (virtual private server), you will probably run a command similar to this:
apt-get install php5-curl
If your blog is on a hosting environment (without shell access!), you’ll need to find a different way to have the extension installed.
Once cURL is successfully installed, restart/reload Apache. One way to do that would be to run the following:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
That fixed the problem for me. I hope it helps someone out there that finds this post!
— Onyx