New Twitter Plugin for BuddyPress
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We’re just about finished creating a new Twitter plugin designed especially for Buddypress. Here’s a list of features – and we’ll update this thread with a URL for more info when we release the plugin in the next couple of days:
– Adds a new Settings page for people to configure their Twitter ID and psw.
– Adds options to selectively tweet posts (in the Add New post screen for blogs – if the blogs component is enabled in BP )
– Adds a screen where logged-in users can send tweets from within BP if they’ve configured their Twitter login details.
– Adds all new tweets sent from within BP to the Activity page (but not for tweeted posts since new posts already show up there)
– Integrates a Twitter menu item in the user’s public nav bar if they’ve configured their Twitter ID and psw. This allows the public to view the user’s last 20 tweets. It also shows the number of “followers” and “following” for the user, plus the total tweet count.
– Integrates a Twitter Trends pages that shows the most popular search phrases at Twitter over a 7 day time span. There is also an option to display today’s trends at the bottom of a user’s list of tweets.
– Adds a multi-instance widget to the blogs (if the blogs module is enabled in BP) to display tweets in the sidebar. Because this is a multi-instance widget it can be used for blogs that have more than one author or for users who have more than one Twitter account – e.g. each widget instance can be configured with a unique Twitter account.
– It’s performance friendly. After getting the user’s tweets from Twitter the data is stored for one hour before being refreshed – unless a user posts a tweet from within BP or tweets a blog post – in those cases the cache refreshes. The same holds true for the trends data – except trends data is site-wide, meaning it is only downloaded once per hour regardless of how many users have Twitter configured in their account.
– The caching mechanism works with WP Cache (or other cache tools that integrate WP Cache – such as WP Super Cache and derivatives) and if there’s no caching enabled then it will use the database to cache data.
So that’s it at the moment. Any wish list items before we wrap this up?
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@Gpo1: Not sure what you mean by all of that except your question about tweeting. Can you elaborate please?
Right now there is a separate page for sending new tweets. But we might integrate an option into the Wire screen. We’ll check into it before releasing.
As for Facebook, we might be able to add that via a different plugin since it doesn’t exactly pertain to Twitter.
@Kunal17: Search sounds cool. We could add a widget for that. Twitter search API is diverse, so we’ll have to figure out how to handle that without making a widget config overly confusing for plugin users.
We added a new feature to the plugin today: Rate limit detection. What – you didn’t know Twitter only allows X number of data downloads per hour? Ya, they do. So we’ve added code to help ensure that limit isn’t exceed (it should only happen in rare circumstances) and if it is then a friendly message shows up to let readers know that the tweet and trend content might be not entirely fresh at the moment.
Details: Twitter limits API calls to 100 per hour per user, or 100 per hour per IP address if you’re not authenticating whiile making an API call. So basically, those limits would only be exceeded if some BP user had plugins all over the planet each downloading their tweets or they were using a badly designed twitter plugin somewhere else (unlikely, but it could happen). Or, it could happen if a site is on a shared hosting account and lots of other sites on the same server are making Twitter API calls for trend or search data – again, unlikely, but it could happen.
So we try to handle those cases gracefully via code. And, so far I’ve not seen any other Twitter plugins for WP or WPMU that deal with those possibilities.
We try to be thorough (perfection is impossible
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