Add your Twitter timeline to your CakePHP application

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I made a gist of the plugin, https://gist.github.com/prbaron/4725934

Twitter just changed its API so I decided to write my own library to display my Twitter feeds on my website.

Today, I will share it to you and I will teach you how to use it in your CakePHP website. The first thing you have to do is to download the class and to place it in you Lib folder.

Below is the single public method to find your tweets with all the default options.

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<?php
$this->find(
    "prbaron", // Twitter account name
    array(
        'count'            => 10, // number of tweets returned
        'exclude_replies'  => true, // do not show replies tweets
        'include_entities' => true, // do not show
        'include_rts'      => true, // show retweets
        'trim_user'        => true // only show the status author numerical id
    ),
    array(
        'cache_duration' => '+30mins', // time of the cache
        'hashtag_class'  => 'pbtwitter-hashtag', // class of hashtag links
        'url_class'      => 'pbtwitter-url', // class of url links
        'user_class'     => 'pbtwitter-user' // class of user links
    )
);
?>

Now we can create our Twitter MVC, so go ahead and create your Twitter model (app/Model/Twitter.php) :

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<?php

 class Twitter extends AppModel{
    public $useTable = false; // we do not need a table in our Database
}

Twitter controller (app/Controller/TwitterController.php) :

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<?php
class TwitterController extends AppController{

    public function index(){
        // import the PBTwitter class from the Lib folder
        App::import('Lib', 'PBTwitter');

        // create a new instance of the class
        $Twitter = new PBTwitter();

        // find the last 3 tweets
        $d['tweets'] = $Twitter->find('prbaron', array('count' => 3));

        // set the tweets to my view
        $this->set($d);
    }
}

Twitter view (app/Views/Twitter/index.ctp) :

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<ul>
    <?php foreach($tweets as $k => $v): ?>
        <?php debug($v); // show the array of the tweet ?>
        <li><?php echo $v['text']; ?></li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

And that’s all, now you can display your timeline to all your visitors.