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A plugin for developers and designers that sets up a WP_Cron to pull in and cache a user’s stream using OAuth and the Twitter v1.1 REST API. It’s all that a developer needs to incorporate a Twitter feed on their site, the OAuth handling, caching to avoid rate limiting, and utilities to easily format Tweets correctly without predefined styles to work around. For designers, the plugin creates a widget that can be used to easily display and style Tweets in your theme.
There are two main ways to access the Tweets, one aimed at developers and one aimed at designers.
This plugin creates a widget that allows display of the most recent Tweets in any sidebar in your theme. When adding the widget you can customize how many Tweets and what information is displayed, choosing from content, time, author, and source. The widget outputs HTML5 which with classes to style on every element, including flagging Tweets as Retweets and Replies. You will be able to style this widget to look exactly as you need it it to.
For those with something special in mind and willing to get their hands dirty, this plugin provides powerful access to the DB of Tweets. Tweets can be grabbed through a template tag and are provided in a special object jam packed with features:
STF_Tweet
An array of these objects is returned by the template tag instead of the WP_Post
object, or an individual can be constructed by passing the post ID of the Tweet to the object constructor.
The object provides a number of useful methods when working with Tweets. This object has the following accessible properties:
is_retweet
– This boolean will be true
when the Tweet is a Retweetis_reply
– This boolean will be true
when the Tweet is a Reply to another Tweetcontent
– The content of the Tweet, this will be automatically formatted to link other referenced Twitter users, hashtags, and inline linkstime
– A timestamp of the Tweet, timezoned to the WP install, in Y-m-d H:i:s formattime_gmt
– A timestamp of the Tweet, timezoned to GMT, in Y-m-d H:i:s formattime_str
– The string that represents how long it’s been since the Tweet, in the way that Twitter usually dates its Tweets, good for an international audience since this isn’t timezone specicificThe object has the following methods:
get_source()
– Returns the string representing the device used to Tweet this statusget_raw_tweet()
– Returns the cached raw response from the API as an object, this should rarely be used as almost all information on the Tweet is accessible without loading this objectget_author_link()
– Returns a string that is the link to the Tweet’s author’s page on Twitterget_retweet_info()
– Returns the info on the original Tweet of a Retweet, or false if the Tweet is not a Retweet, the object returned contains:
username
– The Twitter username of the original Tweetscreenname
– The Twitter screenname of the original Tweetcontent
– The unformatted content of the original Tweettime_gmt
– The GMT time of the Retweeturl
– A direct link to the original Tweetuser_url
– A direct link to the profile of the original Twitter userget_reply_info()
– Returns the info on the original status that this Tweet is replying to, the info is as follows:
url
– The direct link to the original statusin_reply_to_name
– The screenname of the original Twitter userin_reply_to_user_url
– The direct link to the original Twitter user’s profileget_author_info()
– Gets the raw object response from the Twitter API scrape, there are a lot of variables in the raw object, but here’s the main attributes:
id_str
– The id of the username
– The nice name of the author accountscreen_name
– The username of the author accountdescription
– The self-provided description of the author on Twittercreated_at
– The creation date of the Twitter author accountprofile_image_url
– Link to the profile image of the Twitter author accountprofile_image_url_https
– Secure link to the profile image of the Twitter author accountstf_get_tweets($args)
This will be the main function used to get Tweets from the DB. This function takes an array of parameters as follows:
$args['num']
– This tells us how many Tweets to get from the DB, defaults to 5$args['offset']
– This tells us how many Tweets to skip over when selecting our Tweets, defaults to 0$args['retweets']
– This tells us whether or not to get Retweets, defaults to true
$args['replies']
– This tells us whether or not to get Replies, defaults to true