CakePHP Twitter Plugin for API v1.1

CakePHP 2.x Twitter API (V1.1) Plugin

@Author Daniel Voyce
@Date 24th February 2014
@Requires CakePHP 2.x (Tested on 2.4.3)
@Requires https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth (Forked in my repos)

A plugin that takes care of all of the OAuth authentication and then fetches an OAuth Token (These are long lived and therefore can be used to display a twitter feed on your website or create a Twitter App / Interface.

Gives a model that can be imported into your controllers to interact with any of the Twitter GET / POST endpoints.

Installation

1. Install Abrahams twitteroauth library (I have forked the version I used - https://github.com/voycey/twitteroauth) into app/Vendor/twitteroauth (so you should have app/Vendor/twitteroauth/twitteroauth)
2. Clone this repository into app/Plugin/Twitter
3. Import the SQL file into your database using whatever method you prefer
4. Edit app/Plugin/Config/bootstrap.php and put in your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret that you obtained from http://dev.twitter.com and your screen name.
5. Load the plugin in bootstrap.php of your app:

CakePlugin::load(array('Twitter' => array('routes' => true, 'bootstrap' => true)) 

Set-up

Ok so now you have the files in place you need to authorise your app with twitter:

1. Go to yourdomain.com/Twitter/authorise_twitter
2. Login with your twitter details if asked if not you should be redirected back to the homepage and your app is now authorised.

If you weren't redirected back to the homepage then you have probably missed a step - recheck.

Usage

The basic usage of this is to instantiate a copy of the model (with either loadModel or by putting it in your $uses array) and then either use the GET or POST methods provided against whichever twitter end point you want: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1

Basic Examples:

This is the simplest usage of it - the default get() method fetches the tweets of the screen name you entered in bootstrap.php

$this->loadModel('Twitter.Twitter');
$twitter = $this->Twitter->get();

This will get a different users 7 latest tweets:

$this->loadModel('Twitter.Twitter');
$twitter = $this->Twitter->get('statuses/user_timeline', array('screen_name' => 'voycey', 'count' => 7));

And obviously you can do POST requests aswell, This will post an awesome message to your Twitter!

$this->loadModel('Twitter.Twitter');
$twitter = $this->Twitter->post();

This will post a custom message to your Twitter:

$this->loadModel('Twitter.Twitter');
$twitter = $this->Twitter->post('statuses/update',array('status'=>'This is an awesome status message');

See the full list of endpoints at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1

There are also some handy functions I have put in Twitter.Helper:

This will take the text of a tweet and parse all of the links, hashtags and usernames into links (courtesy of http://saturnboy.com/2010/02/parsing-twitter-with-regexp/), pass in the twitter->text part and it will output a nicely formatted html snippet of the tweet.

public function parse_tweet($tweet_text) {}

I have also added in a time calculator so you have Twitters "Posted 20h ago" or "Posted 3 days ago"

function time_ago($date,$granularity=2) {}

Hope this helps - feel free to use / abuse this - since Twitter took all their public access off it can be quite confusing getting started with it

Custom Settings Table

If you want to use your own Settings Table you can change the $useTable variable in the Twitter Model and then make sure you change lines 50 onwards of TwittersController.php to match your databsase table structure.