mod_twitter¶

Import Twitter updates in your Zotonic site in realtime.

The Twitter module allows you to have Tweets ‘mirrored’ from Twitter into your Zotonic site. It does this by creating a background process which has a continuous HTTP connection to the Twitter Streaming API. This way, Tweets arrive instantly at your Zotonic site, no polling necessary!

Installation¶

Enable the mod_twitter module. Then

In the “config” section in the admin, create 2 new config keys:

mod_twitter / api_login - Your Twitter username

mod_twitter / api_password - Your Twitter password

We need your account details to startup the streaming API. mod_twitter will never write to your account: it only reads your updates.

Now, activate the Twitter module under “Modules”.

When you have activated the Twitter module, you should go to a person’s page in the admin. In the edit page, you see in the sidebar a new item, called “Twitter ID”. Here you can enter the numeric Twitter ID of this user. Visit My Twitter Id to find out your twitter ID.

At this point the module will login to Twitter and start following the user(s) that you entered their Twitter IDs for. Only public (or unprotected) Tweets will be imported.

Domain model¶

The domain model for this module is the following: the module creates a category Tweet as a subcategory of text. Each time a Tweet is imported, a resource of this category is created.

From the Tweet there is an author edge to the person that created the Tweet (i.e. the user who you set the Twitter ID on).

The body text of the Tweet resource is HTML will already be preprocessed with the twitter filter, so URLs, hash-tags and @-links are converted to HTML already when the Tweet is saved.

The original value of the Tweet (the JSON object received from Twitter) is stored inside the tweet property in the Tweet resource, and can be displayed like this:

{% print m.rsc[id].tweet %}

Using logon with Twitter¶

Add an app on Twitter and get the consumer key / secret. In Zotonic, configure two config keys, mod_twitter.consumer_key and mod_twitter.consumer_secret to contain these values. Now set up the callback URL to your Zotonic site in the Twitter app. The logon window will now automatically show a “Sign in with Twitter” button.