Django Twitter Tag

A django template tag to display user's recent tweets / search results. Version 1.0 uses Twitter API 1.1.

Basic features are limiting numbers of displayed tweets, filtering out replies and retweets. Library exposes each tweet json in template, adding extra attributes: html and datetime. First one makes urls, hashtags or twitter usernames clickable, juts like you expect them to be. Last one provides python datetime object to ease output in templates. Urls are expanded by default. Library handles twitter exceptions gracefully, returning last successful response.

Usage

• Load tag in your template like this:

  {% load twitter_tag %}

• Get user's (futurecolors in example) most recent tweets and store them in tweets variable:

  {% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets %}

• Now you have a list of tweets in your template context, which you can iterate over like this:

  <ul>
  {% for tweet in tweets %}
      <li>{{ tweet.html|safe }}</li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>

Installation

This app works with python 2.7 and 3.3, Django 1.4-1.6.

Recommended way to install is pip:

pip install django-twitter-tag

Add twitter_tag to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (...
                  'twitter_tag',
                  ...
                 )

Configuration

Twitter API 1.1 requires authentication for every request you make, so you have to provide some credentials for oauth dance to work. First, create an application, second, request access token on newly created app page. The process of obtaining a token is explained in detail in docs.

Here is an example of how your config might look like:

# settings.py
# Make sure to replace with your own values, theses are just made up

# Your access token: Access token
TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN = '91570701-BQMM5Ix9AJUC5JtM5Ix9DtwNAiaaYIYGN2CyPgduPVZKSX'
# Your access token: Access token secret
TWITTER_OAUTH_SECRET = 'hi1UiXm8rF4essN3HlaqMz7GoUvy3e4DsVkBAVsg4M'
# OAuth settings: Consumer key
TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY = '3edIOec4uu00IGFxvQcwJe'
# OAuth settings: Consumer secret
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET = 'YBD6GyFpvumNbNA218RAphszFnkifxR8K9h8Rdtq1A'

For best performance you should set up django cache framework. Cache is used both internally to store last successful json response and externally (see Caching below).

Examples

You can specify number of tweets to show:

{% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets limit 10 %}

To filter out tweet replies (that start with @ char):

{% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets exclude "replies" %}

To ignore native retweets:

{% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets exclude "retweets" %}

Or everything from above together:

{% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets exclude "replies, retweets" limit 10 %}

Search tag (experimental)

You can search for tweets:

{% search_tweets for "python 3" as tweets limit 5 %}

Search api arguments are supported via key=value pairs:

{% search_tweets for "python 3" as tweets lang='eu' result_type='popular' %}

Relevant API docs for search.

Caching

It's strongly advised to use template caching framework to reduce the amount of twitter API calls and avoid reaching rate limit (currently, 180 reqs in 15 minutes):

{% load twitter_tag cache %}
{% cache 60 my_tweets %}
{% get_tweets for "futurecolors" as tweets exclude "retweets" %}
...
{% endcache %}

Extra

Tweet's properties

get_tweets returns a list of tweets into context. Each tweets is a json dict, that has exactly the same attributes, as stated in API 1.1 docs, describing tweet json. Tweet's created timestamp is converted to python object and is available in templates:

{{ tweet.datetime|date:"D d M Y" }}

Tweet's html

Tweet also has extra html property, which contains tweet, formatted for html output with all needed links. Note, Twitter has guidelines for developers on how embeded tweets should look like.

Exception handling

Any Twitter API exceptions like 'Over capacity' are silenced and logged. Django cache is used internally to store last successful response in case twitter is down.

Going beyond

Since version 1.0 you can create your own template tags for specific twitter queries, not supported by this library. Simply inherit from twitter_tag.templatetags.twitter_tag.BaseTwitterTag and implement your own get_json method (tag syntax is contolled by django-classy-tags).

Development

To install development version, use pip install django-twitter-tag==dev

Tests

Run:

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = twitter_tag.test_settings python setup.py test