twitter-feed-droplet

Some time ago I needed to add a twitter feed to a website.
I did not want to use javascript for this because for SEO purposes it is good to have changing content in the page output.
So I made a Droplet for it.

Code:

<?php
//use [[tweet?name=mytweetname&max=5]]

if (isset($_SESSION['tweets'])) return $_SESSION['tweets']; //prevent too many calls
if (!isset($name)) return true;
if (!isset($max)) $max = 5;

if (!function_exists('fetch_tweets')) {
function fetch_tweets($username, $maxtweets) {
$tweets = simplexml_load_file("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/" . $username . ".rss");
$tweet_array = array();
foreach ( $tweets->channel->item as $tweet ) {
if ($maxtweets == 0) {
break;
} else {
$twit = $tweet->description;
$twit = substr(strstr($twit, ': '), 2, strlen($twit));
$twit = preg_replace("/([\w]+:\/\/[\w-?&;#~=\.\/\@]+[\w\/])/i","<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"$1\">$1</a>",$twit);
$twit = preg_replace("(@([a-zA-Z0-9\_]+))", "<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.twitter.com/\\1\">\\0</a>", $twit);
$twit = preg_replace('/(^|\s)#(\w+)/', '\1<a target=\"_blank\" href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23\2">#\2</a>', $twit);
$twit = iconv("UTF-8", DEFAULT_CHARSET, $twit);
$pubdate = strtotime($tweet->pubDate);
$propertime = date(DATE_FORMAT.', '.TIME_FORMAT, $pubdate);  //Customize this to your liking
$tweet_item = array('desc' => $twit,'date' => $propertime,);
array_push($tweet_array, $tweet_item);
$maxtweets--;
}
}
return $tweet_array;
}
}
$mytweets = fetch_tweets($name, $max);
$rval = '<div class="twitter-updates">';
foreach ($mytweets as $k => $v) {
     $rval .= '<div><p class="twitter-update">' .$v['desc']. '</p><p class="twitter-date">' .$v['date']. '</p></div>';
}
$rval .= '</div>';
$_SESSION['tweets'] = $rval;
return $rval;

The droplet is called like [[tweets?name=billgates&max=10]] (max is optional)

It is depending on the simplexml library. According to the PHP website this is included in the standard PHP-5 installations, so it might work on most hosts.

The tweets are loaded once per browser session. This is to prevent being banned by twitter for requesting data too much from a single IP address.

Have fun with it.

Ruud