TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

monkeyninja · 2010-04-09 12:24:00

kevinpotts wrote:

@monkeyninja — This plugin is working really well on DeCal on the admin side. My big question: can you introduce an option to allow tweeting of future-dated articles? Basically my site is a giant calendar of forthcoming events, so all posted dates occur in the future. It would be totally awesome to be able to tweet these just like I do for “normal” articles because all of the future-dated content is currently visible on my site.

The current limitation on tweeting only live articles posted in the present/past was purely to prevent users from being able to tweet links to articles that have yet to go live on a site. I’d be reluctant to change this, although perhaps an option could be provided to allow this to be overridden. This could either be on the edit screen so that it could be activated on an article-by-article basis (my preferred option); or through the plugin preferences. Any thoughts on how this would be most useful to people?

philwareham · 2010-04-09 12:31:25

Slightly different subject, but I’d love it if you could set future posted articles to ‘auto tweet’ as they become live on the site.

kevinpotts · 2010-04-09 12:43:22

The current limitation on tweeting only live articles posted in the present/past was purely to prevent users from being able to tweet links to articles that have yet to go live on a site. I’d be reluctant to change this, although perhaps an option could be provided to allow this to be overridden. This could either be on the edit screen so that it could be activated on an article-by-article basis (my preferred option); or through the plugin preferences. Any thoughts on how this would be most useful to people?

I understand completely. To me, you could have a simple dropdown in the plugin’s “Options” link (the one visible in the Plugins tab of the admin area) that says:

Only tweet past articles (default)
Tweet all articles as posted date becomes live (to accommodate @philwareham)
Tweet past and future articles when first published (what I originally requested)

These may not be very well written (not my expertise), but I think it covers all bases.

monkeyninja · 2010-04-19 12:24:59

kevinpotts wrote:

I understand completely. To me, you could have a simple dropdown in the plugin’s “Options” link (the one visible in the Plugins tab of the admin area) that says:

Only tweet past articles (default)

Tweet all articles as posted date becomes live (to accommodate @philwareham)

Tweet past and future articles when first published (what I originally requested)

These may not be very well written (not my expertise), but I think it covers all bases.

Thanks for the reply. I am beginning to think that having this as a preference in the plugin’s options (as you suggest) is the way forward, with the possibility of an override being added to the options on the article edit screen. For now I am going to build on enabling tweets both past and future being tweeted on publication. As I think I’ve mentioned before, philwareham’s request in somewhat harder to achieve and would probably require a cron job being created in order to update Twitter once the article goes live. Does anyone know if there is an in-built way of running cron jobs with Textpattern?

monkeyninja · 2010-04-26 17:46:34

I’ve just found out that from the end of June the basic authorisation used by arc_twitter is being turned off! This is a bit of a pain as it looks like the architecture behind this plugin is now going to need to be reworked. It will also mean that after June older versions of the plugin will cease to work.

maniqui · 2010-04-28 05:56:18

Thanks for creating this plugin, monkeyninja.

One question regarding your post above: will this change (on the basic authorisation inner cogs) break any of the front-ends functionalities of this plugin? (more particularly: the listing of public tweets by any user).

And while here, two features requests :)

1) what about adding a few <txp>-ish tags (or just one new tag <txp:arc_twitter_data /> with a type attribute, or even beeter, {replacement} tags, alla smd_ style) to have a better control over the mark up of each tweet?
While there, remember to add form attribute, container tag capabilities and offset attribute (to break lists of tweets and do crazy stuff). ;)

2) The crazy one: it would be cool, although a bit dangerous if not set properly, to add a front-end tag to render a simple form for tweetering (ie. a ultra-simple Twitter client ;)).
Similar to the one in the Admin side, but this one rendered somewhere on the website’s front-end…
Of course, this brings a problem or two: who is the “user” that authenticates and post tweets using this form?
This brings a few ideas of crazy things to do, I think, if both the Twitter API & TOS let you do them. But before going into details of this crazy things, please, let me know if this idea is inside or just totally outside of the scope of this plugin.

Thanks again!

maniqui · 2010-05-01 01:05:50

Also, a few times, the plugin failed in two different ways:

1) “randomly”, can’t remember, and it had output some classic TXP error/warning messages (like 5 o 6) at the top. Of course, I didn’t copied them, and now I’m “complaining” here. I just remember that they were related to simplexml, or something like that. Next time, if there is a next time, I’ll copy-paste the messages here. <= Less helpful bug report ever.

2) It seems that sometimes, the plugin takes a lot of time trying to fetch the tweets from Twitter and the page taked a lot to render. Runtime value was above 20 Then, if I removed the arc_twitter code from the template, the page rendered almost instantly, and the Runtime was near 0.2. So, it was definitely something related to arc_twitter and Twitter.

3) I’m developing on local server. At one moment, my ADSL connection was down, and it happened something similar: the page timed out without rendering.

Not sure if possible, but some kind of “time out after X seconds” option would be great to have a control on those cases.

In the meanwhile, I’ve disable plugin’s built-in cache in favor of wrapping arc_twitter with aks_cache.

maniqui · 2010-05-05 14:58:59

@monkeyninja:

Forget about the “what about adding a few <txp>-ish tags (or just one new tag <txp:arc_twitter_data />” feature request.
Probably, too much a hassle to code.
But… (there is always a “but”), what about adding a raw="1" attribute that just returns the XML version of the tweet… Then, it could be feed into smd_xml, and voilà! We make arc_twitter and smd_xml an advanced way of playing with tweets…
Does the idea have any merit? Am I missing something?

Thanks.

jstubbs · 2010-05-06 05:54:24

The error message when selecting “update twitter” from the Write window is as follows:

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /users/home/username/web/textpattern/textpattern/lib/txplib_misc.php(594) : eval()'d code on line 360

Is this to do with the recent Twitter API changes?

Edit: Despite the error message, the tweet is sent to Twitter correctly.

Last edited by jstubbs (2010-05-06 05:58:36)

monkeyninja · 2010-05-08 14:13:11

maniqui wrote:

Thanks for creating this plugin, monkeyninja.

One question regarding your post above: will this change (on the basic authorisation inner cogs) break any of the front-ends functionalities of this plugin? (more particularly: the listing of public tweets by any user).

And while here, two features requests :)

1) what about adding a few <txp>-ish tags (or just one new tag <txp:arc_twitter_data /> with a type attribute, or even beeter, {replacement} tags, alla smd_ style) to have a better control over the mark up of each tweet?
While there, remember to add form attribute, container tag capabilities and offset attribute (to break lists of tweets and do crazy stuff). ;)

2) The crazy one: it would be cool, although a bit dangerous if not set properly, to add a front-end tag to render a simple form for tweetering (ie. a ultra-simple Twitter client ;)).
Similar to the one in the Admin side, but this one rendered somewhere on the website’s front-end…
Of course, this brings a problem or two: who is the “user” that authenticates and post tweets using this form?
This brings a few ideas of crazy things to do, I think, if both the Twitter API & TOS let you do them. But before going into details of this crazy things, please, let me know if this idea is inside or just totally outside of the scope of this plugin.

Thanks again!

Hi, anything that requires authentication (all the back-end stuff) will break with current and older versions of the plugin from the end of June onwards. This is the result of a change in the way Twitter’s API will work. There’s not a lot I can do about this other than to try and rework the way the plugin handles this. I am hoping that I should be able to rectify this so that it uses the new method. I do all this in my free time which I am a little short of at the moment but I am trying to fit it in.

Obviously because of this change in the way things work I will be concentrating on migrating my code over to the new methods before I even begin to consider working on new features. However, I had already been considering something along your idea of a raw data output. Depending on how things come along I will try and drop a “raw” parameter into the tags in the next release if it can be done easily. Otherwise for now there is a freeze on new features.

I’m really glad people are finding the plugin useful and hopefully the fix will be out sooner rather than later so that people can continue to benefit from it.

monkeyninja · 2010-05-08 14:16:44

jstubbs wrote:

The error message when selecting “update twitter” from the Write window is as follows:

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /users/home/username/web/textpattern/textpattern/lib/txplib_misc.php(594) : eval()'d code on line 360

Is this to do with the recent Twitter API changes?

Edit: Despite the error message, the tweet is sent to Twitter correctly.

Shouldn’t be. Others have had this bug in the past, but I thought it had been rectified in the most recent version. Sorry I can’t really help much more as I need to focus on migrating the code ready for the changes in the authentication process as otherwise the plugin is just not going to work after June.

monkeyninja · 2010-06-13 12:03:31

Hi everyone, arc_twitter v1.0beta is finally ready for download. If you’re using an older version then you’ll need to upgrade ASAP as Twitter is turning off basic authentication from June 30th 2010. Once installed you just need to go to the plugin’s options screen and follow the links to connect it to your Twitter account and then all should be relatively back to normal.

I’m really sorry that I have been a little slow in getting this out to people. It has been a bit of a headache to be honest. I do this in my free time, which I have been rather short of since Twitter’s original announcement.

Not much in the way of new features other than the following (which would have been in the release I was originally working on before Twitter announced the change in their API):-

Improved and more secure authentication process
Is.gd URL shortner support in addition to TinyURL and smd_short_url
Two new class attributes for the arc_twitter and arc_twitter_search tags: class_posted and class_user

I hope to get back to work on new and more exciting features soon. I have plenty of ideas that I want to get working on.

Thanks for your patience and good luck with the upgrades.

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#61 2010-04-09 12:24:00

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#62 2010-04-09 12:31:25

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#63 2010-04-09 12:43:22

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#64 2010-04-19 12:24:59

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#65 2010-04-26 17:46:34

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#66 2010-04-28 05:56:18

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#67 2010-05-01 01:05:50

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#68 2010-05-05 14:58:59

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#69 2010-05-06 05:54:24

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#70 2010-05-08 14:13:11

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#71 2010-05-08 14:16:44

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

#72 2010-06-13 12:03:31

Re: TXP Tweet: arc_twitter and arc_twitter_intents

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