[Plugin: Twitter Tools] Default hashtags blog post tweets not being read

When using Twitter Tools and Twitter Tools – Hashtags, I’ve set the default hashtags (and verified that it was stored). However, the default hashtags field is not populated in new blog posts.

I tracked the issue down to line 21 of twitter-tools-hashtags.php:

empty($post->ID) ? $hashtags = get_option('aktt_hash_tags') : $hashtags = get_post_meta($post->ID, '_aktt_hash_meta', true);

I think the problem is that empty($post->ID) is being used to see if this is a newly created post or if this is a saved post (draft, published, or otherwise).

If this is a new post, then use the default hashtags.
If this is a saved post, then used the stored _aktt_hash_meta value

However, empty($post->ID) should always evaluate to false because even newly created posts have an ID. I cross checked this by inserted some debug statements and then doing some research which turned up line 152 in wp-admin/post.php (https://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/3.0/wp-admin/post.php)

if ( empty($post->ID) )
		wp_die( __('You attempted to edit an item that doesn’t exist. Perhaps it was deleted?') );

I tried a couple of different things for attempting to detect if a post was new or not, but wasn’t able to come up with anything that works. My one thought was to check the value of get_post_meta($post->ID, '_aktt_hash_meta', false) to see if it would return as a string because “The function returns an empty string if the key has not yet been set, regardless of the value of $single.” …per https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/get_post_meta but it’s returning an array, which means that the key has already been set when you create the new post, so that won’t work.

I guess the questions are: am I the only one having this issue (I don’t think so, but I try not to assume), can you validate the issue, and is it going to be fixed?

As a side note, attribute_escape has been depreciated in favor of esc_attr