friendica-addons/twitter

Twitter Plugin

Main authors Tobias Diekershoff and Michael Vogel.

With this addon to friendica you can give your user the possibility to post their public messages to Twitter. The messages will be strapped their rich context and shortened to 140 characters length if necessary. If shortening of the message was performed a link will be added to the Tweet pointing to the original message on your server.

The addon can also mirror a users Tweets into the ~friendica wall.

There is a similar addon for forwarding public messages to StatusNet.

Requirements

To use this plugin you have to register an application for your friendica instance on Twitter with

• read and write access
• don't set a callback URL
• we do not intend to use Twitter for login The registration can be done at twitter.com/apps and you need a Twitter account for doing so.

After you registered the application you get an OAuth consumer key / secret pair that identifies your app, you will need them for configuration.

The inclusion of a shorturl for the original posting in cases when the message was longer than 140 characters requires it, that you have PHP5+ and curl on your server.

Where to find

In the friendica addon git repository /twitter/, this directory contains all required PHP files (including the Twitter OAuth library by Abraham Williams, MIT licensed and the Slinky library by Beau Lebens, BSD license), a CSS file for styling of the user configuration and an image to Sign in with Twitter.

Configuration

Global Configuration

If you enabled an administrator account, please use the admin panel to configure the Twitter relay. If you for any reason prefer to use a configuration file instead of the admin panels, please refer to the Alternative Configuration below.

Activate the plugin from the plugins section of your admin panel. When you have done so, add your consumer key and consumer secret in the settings section of the plugin page.

When this is done your user can now configure their Twitter connection at "Settings -> Connector Settings" and enable the forwarding of their public messages to Twitter.

Alternative Configuration

To activate this addon add twitter to the list of active addons in your .htconfig.php file

$a->config['system']['addon'] = "twitter, ..."

Afterwards you need to add your OAuth consumer key / secret pair to it by adding the following two lines

$a->config['twitter']['consumerkey'] = 'your consumer KEY here';
$a->config['twitter']['consumersecret'] = 'your consumer SECRET here';

Mirroring of Public Postings

To avoid endless loops of public postings that are send to Twitter and then mirrored back into your friendica stream you have to set the name of the application you registered there of your friendica node is using to post to Twitter in the .htconfig.php file.

$a->config['twitter']['application_name'] = "yourname here";

Connector Options for the User

When the OAuth consumer informations are correctly placed into the configuration file and a user visits the "Connector Settings" page they can now connect to Twitter. To do so one has to follow the Sign in with Twitter button (the page will be opened in a new browser window/tab) and get a PIN from Twitter. This PIN has to be entered on the settings page. After submitting the PIN the plugin will get OAuth credentials identifying this user from the friendica account.

After this step was successful the user now has the following config options.

• Allow posting to StatusNet If you want your public postings being optionally posted to your associated Twitter account as well, you need to check this box.
• Send public postings to StatusNet by default if you want to have all your public postings being send to your Twitter account you need to check this button as well. Otherwise you have to enable the relay of your postings in the ACL dialog (click the lock button) before posting an entry.
• Mirror all posts from statusnet that are no replies or repeated messages if you want your postings from Twitter also appear in your friendica postings, check this box. Replies to other people postings, repostings and your own postings that were send from friendica wont be mirrored into your friendica stream.
• Shortening method that optimizes the post by default friendica checks how many characters your Twitter instance allows you to use for a posting and if a posting is longer then this amount of characters it will shorten the message posted on Twitter and add a short link back to the original posting. Optionally you can check this box to have the shortening of the message use an optimization algorithm. TODO add infos how this is optimized
• Send linked #-tags and @-names to StatusNet if you want your #-tags and @-mentions linked to the friendica network, check this box. If you want to have Twitter handle these things for the relayed end of the posting chain, uncheck it.
• Clear OAuth configuration if you want to remove the currently associated Twitter account from your friendica account you have to check this box and then hit the submit button. The saved settings will be deleted and you have to reconfigure the Twitter connector to be able to relay your public postings to a Twitter account.

License

The StatusNet Connector is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license see the LICENSE file in the addons directory.