PHP Twitter Widget

A PHP alternative to the Twitter Embed Timelines JavaScript.

Twitter Embedded Timelines allow you to show your latest tweets using JavaScript. While this can help you easily implement your latest tweets on you website, I needed to create a similar effect without including any additional JavaScript files on the web page.

I decided to create a script that will fetch tweets server-side, and allow for including in a web page without JavaScript includes. I also needed to ensure I cached the result, to avoid hitting API limits.

Using the popular TwitterOAuth PHP Library for authentication, we can access the Twitter Rest API.

Works with PHP 5.3+ through to PHP 8.1+.

View PHP Twitter Widget on GitHub

Usage

First, you need to head over to https://apps.twitter.com and register your new Application. You will need the following keys for your new 'App'.

Consumer Key
Consumer Secret Key (This must always remain private)
Access Token
Access Token Secret

You can now install the PHP Twitter Widget using composer:

composer install benhall14/php-twitter-widget

To implement, first instantiate a TwitterWidget with your credentials to fetch the feed. The feed will be cached so we don't call the API on every page load. The default cache file age limit is 3600 seconds (1 hour).


            require '../vendor/autoload.php';
            

            try {
            $twitterWidget = new TwitterWidget(
            $consumer_key,             # your Twitter consumer key
            $consumer_secret,          # your Twitter consumer secret
            $access_token,             # your Twitter access token
            $access_token_secret,      # your Twitter access token secret
            'nasa',                    # the screen name of the Twitter feed to display
            15,                        # the number of tweets to return
            '../cache/twitter_status_feed.json', # path to the cache file
            3600                       # the number of seconds to cache the feed for, default is 3600 (1 hour)
            );
            } catch (Exception $e) {
            /* handle any error thrown, such as unwritable cache file */
            echo $e->getMessage();
            }

You can then use the following to display the feed on your web page, passing the your chosen feed title, such as "My Tweets". The second optional parameter should be a boolean of whether to print(true) or return(false) the formatted feed. The third optional parameter is the tweet date format - default = M d H:i A.

echo $twitterWidget->display('My Tweets', true, 'M d H:i A');

Requirements

Works with PHP 5.3, PHP 5.5 through to PHP8.1+

PHP CURL Extension

TwitterOAuth Library

License

Licensed under the MIT license

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If you find this project helpful or useful in any way, please consider getting me a cup of coffee - It's really appreciated :)

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