PHPTweet

A PHP class for fetching tweets from a Twitter user's timeline, and rendering them as an HTML list.

Features

• Works with Twitter API v1.1
• Tweets are cached to avoid exceeding Twitter’s API request rate limits
• A fallback is provided in case the twitter feed fails to load
• Retweets and @replies can optionally be ignored
• A configuration parameter allows you to specify how many tweets are displayed
• Dates can optionally be displayed in “Twitter style”, e.g. “12 minutes ago”
• You can customize the HTML that wraps your tweets, tweet status and meta information

Usage

To interact with Twitter's API you will need to create an API KEY, which you can create at: https://dev.twitter.com/apps

After creating your API Key you will need to take note of following values: "Consumer key", "Consumer secret", "Access token", "Access token secret"

Those values can be passed as options to the class constructor, along with the Twitter screen name you wish to query:

$PHPTweet = new PHPTweet(array(
  'consumer_key'              => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  'consumer_secret'           => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  'access_token'              => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  'access_token_secret'       => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  'twitter_screen_name'       => 'yourusername'
));

Then you can display the results like so:

echo $PHPTweet->get_tweet_list();

Options

Options can be overridden by passing an array of key/value pairs to the class constructor. At a minimum you must set the consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, access_token_secret and twitter_screen_name options, as shown above.

Here is a full list of options, and their default values:

'consumer_key'          => '',
'consumer_secret'       => '',
'access_token'          => '',
'access_token_secret'   => '',
'twitter_screen_name'   => '',
'cache_file'            => './twitter.txt', // Where on the server to save the cached tweets
'cachetime'             => 60 * 60, // Seconds to cache feed (1 hour).
'tweets_to_display'     => 10, // How many tweets to fetch
'ignore_replies'        => true, // Ignore @replies
'ignore_retweets'       => true, // Ignore retweets
'twitter_style_dates'   => false, // Use twitter style dates e.g. 2 hours ago
'date_format'           => 'g:i A M jS', // The dafult date format e.g. 12:08 PM Jun 12th
'twitter_wrap_open'     => '<h2>Latest tweets</h2><ul id="twitter">',
'twitter_wrap_close'    => '</ul>',
'tweet_wrap_open'       => '<li><span class="status">',
'meta_wrap_open'        => '</span><span class="meta"> ',
'meta_wrap_close'       => '</span>',
'tweet_wrap_close'      => '</li>'

Caching

Caching is employed because Twitter rate limits how many times their feeds can be accessed per hour.

When the user timeline is first loaded, the resultant HTML list is saved as a text file on your web server. The default location for this file is: ./twitter.txt

You can change this file path by setting the cache_file option.

Credits:

• Feed parsing uses Matt Harris' [tmhOAuth] (https://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth)
• Hashtag/username parsing uses Mike Cochrane's [twitter-text-php] (https://github.com/mikenz/twitter-text-php)