Get Tweets in PHP

Get tweets from a Twitter account with a couple of lines of PHP, and do anything you want with them.

Author:	Netgloo (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:	4.0
WordPress version tested:	4.7.28
Plugin version:	1.2
Added to WordPress repository:	24-08-2015
Last updated:	28-12-2016 Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
Rating, %:	100
Rated by:	2
Plugin URI:
Total downloads:	2 381
Active installs:	100+
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This plugin will add the PHP class GetTweetsInPhp. You can use this class as described below for retrieving latest tweets from a Twitter account, then handle the tweets as you want in your PHP code.

Note: you should create a Twitter app before using this plugin. You can do it from here: http://apps.twitter.com.

Features

• Get latest N tweets from a Twitter account.
• Get the tweet’s text formatted as HTML (with links for each entities).
• Cache support.
• Made for developers.
• Really light and simple.
• Works with the v1.1 Twitter API.
• Trivial install/uninstall (only add/remove the plugin’s files).
• No any data will be permanently stored in your database (only transient data
  if the cache is enabled).
• Proudly coded by Netgloo.

Example usage

Get and show latest tweets from @netglooweb:

// Set configurations
$configs = [
  // Set here tokens from your Twitter's app
  'consumer_key' => 'CONSUMER_KEY', 
  'consumer_secret' => 'CONSUMER_SECRET',

  // The Twitter account name
  'screen_name' => 'netglooweb',

  // The number of tweets
  'count' => 5,
];

// Get latest tweets using the function get_tweets
$tweets = \Netgloo\GetTweetsInPhp::get_tweets($configs);

// ...

// For each tweet show the HTML text and the attached image
foreach ($tweets as $tweet) {

  echo "<p>";
  echo $tweet->n_html_text;

  if ($tweet->n_has_media_photo) {
    echo "<img src='{$tweet->n_media_photo_url}' width='100%' />";
  }

  echo "</p>";

}

// ...

That’s all! Have fun!

Configurations

The get_tweets() function takes an array of configurations:

$configs = [

  // --- Required ---

  // The tokens from your Twitter's app
  'consumer_key' => '...',
  'consumer_secret' => '...',

  // The Twitter account name
  'screen_name' => '...',


  // --- Optional ---

  // The number of tweets
  'count' => 20,

  // Include also the retweets
  'include_rts' => true,

  // In the HTML text will be showed "Retweeted by ..." if the tweet
  // is a retweet
  'show_retweeted_by' => true,

  // Enable the cache
  // It is recommended to activate the cache, when you put live 
  // your website, in order to avoid to reach the Twitter's api rate
  // limit of 300 requests / 15-min.
  'cache_enabled' => false,

  // Cache expiration (in seconds)
  // Increase the value to optimize the website's speed, decrease
  // the value if you want a more real-time behaviour (but not
  // less than 4 seconds to avoid to reach the rate limit).
  'cache_expiration' => 60,

  // Templates

  // Retweeted by text template
  'retweeted_by_template' => 
    '<em> Retweeted by {{user_name}}</em>',

  // Hash tag link template
  'hashtag_link_template' => 
    '<a href="{{hashtag_link}}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">' .
    '#{{hashtag_text}}</a>',

  // Url link template
  'url_link_template' => 
    '<a href="{{url_link}}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" ' .
    'title="{{url_title}}">{{url_text}}</a>',

  // User mention link template
  'user_mention_link_template' => 
    '<a href="{{user_mention_link}}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" ' .
    'title="{{user_mention_title}}">@{{user_mention_text}}</a>',

  // Media link template
  'media_link_template' => 
    '<a href="{{media_link}}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" ' .
    'title="{{media_title}}">{{media_text}}</a>'

];

$tweets = \Netgloo\GetTweetsInPhp::get_tweets($configs);

Returned values

The get_tweets() function will return an Array of tweets. On each tweet object are available these properties:

• n_html_text (String) The tweet text formatted as HTML, with links on each entities.
• n_is_retweeted (Boolean) True if the curret tweet is a retweet.
• n_has_media_photo (Boolean) True if the current tweet has an attached photo.
• n_media_photo_url (String) The url of the tweet’s attached photo.
• n_media_photo_urls (Array) If the tweet has more than one attached photos this properties contains all the urls.

Other available properties are those returned from the user_timeline Twitter’s API.
These are some useful ones:

• created_at
• retweet_count
• user->name
• user->screen_name
• user->profile_image_url

If the properties n_is_retweeted is true the current tweet is a “re-tweet” and the retweeted_status object is available:

• retweeted_status->user->name
• retweeted_status->user->screen_name
• retweeted_status->retweet_count

Example

This code use some of the above properties:

// ...

$tweets = \Netgloo\GetTweetsInPhp::get_tweets($configs);

foreach ($tweets as $tweet) {
  echo $tweet->created_at . "<br/>";
  echo $tweet->n_html_text . "<br/>";
  if ($tweet->n_has_media_photo) {
    echo $tweet->n_media_photo_url  . "<br/>";
  }
}

// ...

Limitations

Since we rely on the Twitter’s user_timeline API, you should read the following docs for taking in account any API’s limitation:

• https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/user_timeline
• https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/timelines

Contributing

For patches, bug reports, suggestions, requests for features there is a Git repository on GitHub here:
https://github.com/netgloo/get-tweets-in-php

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