In this post I want to illustrate a super simple way to work with Twitter API and PHP. In particular, this tutorial explains how to get public updates from Twitter public timeline and display them in a web page with a custom style using CSS. In order to get Twitter updates I used Twitterlibphp (a PHP implementation of the Twitter API) that allows you to take advantage of it from within your PHP applications.
Using this simple method you can obtain awesome results like this:
You can download the source code at the following link and reuse it for free in your web projects (you need PHP and APACHE):
1. A little introduction
Twitterlibphp returns Twitter timeline in XML format and with this structure (take a look at the Twitter API home page for a full list of available nodes.):
status
created_at
id
text
source
user
id
text
source
user
name
screen_name
description
profile_image_url
url
followers_count
...
...screen_name
description
profile_image_url
url
followers_count
...
So, if you want to display the user image, user status, and status date in your timeline you have to choose the following nodes:
But how you can display them? It's very simple! Take a look at the following code!
2. PHP code
Create a new file twitter_status.php and copy and paste the following code:
<div class="twitter_container">
<?php
// require the twitter library
require "twitter.lib.php";
// your twitter username and password
$username = "your_username";
$password = "your_password";
// initialize the twitter class
$twitter = new Twitter($username, $password);
// fetch public timeline in xml format
$xml = $twitter->getPublicTimeline();
$twitter_status = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
foreach($twitter_status->status as $status){
echo '<br/>';
echo '<div class="twitter_posted_at">Posted at:'.$status->created_at.'</div>';
echo '</div>';
}
?>
<div>
<?php
// require the twitter library
require "twitter.lib.php";
// your twitter username and password
$username = "your_username";
$password = "your_password";
// initialize the twitter class
$twitter = new Twitter($username, $password);
// fetch public timeline in xml format
$xml = $twitter->getPublicTimeline();
$twitter_status = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
foreach($twitter_status->status as $status){
foreach($status->user as $user){
echo '<img src="'.$user->profile_image_url.'" class="twitter_image">';
echo '<a href="http://www.twitter.com/'.$user->name.'">'.$user->name.'</a>: ';
}
echo $status->text;echo '<img src="'.$user->profile_image_url.'" class="twitter_image">';
echo '<a href="http://www.twitter.com/'.$user->name.'">'.$user->name.'</a>: ';
}
echo '<br/>';
echo '<div class="twitter_posted_at">Posted at:'.$status->created_at.'</div>';
echo '</div>';
}
?>
<div>
How you can see, the previous code is very simple to understand. The line:
$xml = $twitter->getPublicTimeline();
get the 20 most recent public statuses posted. You can also use other functions such as:
getFriendsTimeline(): returns the 20 most recent statuses posted by the authenticating user and that user's friends.
- getUserTimeline(): returns the 20 most recent statuses posted from the authenticating user.
getReplies(): returns the 20 most recent @replies (status updates prefixed with @username) for the authenticating user.
Take a look at twitter.lib.php for the full list of available functions.
If you want to display different information, for example the source of the update (status->source) use this code:
$status->source
...or if you want to display the number of followers of the current user (follower_count) use this code:
$user->followers_count
3. CSS Code
Now you can customize the style of your timeline using CSS code. I used the following classes but you can customize the look how you prefer:
.twitter_container{
color:#444;
font-size:12px;
width:600px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
.twitter_container a{
color:#0066CC;
font-weight:bold;
}
.twitter_status{
height:60px;
padding:6px;
border-bottom:solid 1px #DEDEDE;
}
.twitter_image{
float:left;
margin-right:14px;
border:solid 2px #DEDEDE;
width:50px;
height:50px;
}
.twitter_posted_at{
font-size:11px;
padding-top:4px;
color:#999;
}
color:#444;
font-size:12px;
width:600px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
.twitter_container a{
color:#0066CC;
font-weight:bold;
}
.twitter_status{
height:60px;
padding:6px;
border-bottom:solid 1px #DEDEDE;
}
.twitter_image{
float:left;
margin-right:14px;
border:solid 2px #DEDEDE;
width:50px;
height:50px;
}
.twitter_posted_at{
font-size:11px;
padding-top:4px;
color:#999;
}
That's all! Download the source code, open twitter_status.php, change $username and $password with your Twitter username and password and upload the file in your test server.
If you have some suggestion, please add a comment!
I am 
Very nice...
Hey thanks mate for this good tutorial... :))
Great article Antonio.
Thanks!
Tutorial Antonio! Real nice.
Why give me an invitation to error in twitter.lib to the 510 line?
its cool
Hi Antonio, thanks a lot! I was looking for that! It works fine! :)))
Thank you
Small comment: Apache is not a requirement, any webserver that supports PHP will do :)
It's generally a bad idea to try and interact with the Twitter API using the same process your user is connected to. i.e. fetching tweets as the page loads is never going to end well. If Twitter is running slow, your page is going to run slow too.
It's far better to use another process to fetch the tweets (such as a PHP script run periodically by cron), stash them in a local cache, and then have you page display data from the cache.
If Twitter is down, then your site is still fast to load and will still display the most up-to-date tweets that are available.
hey, nice tutorial mate, just a quick question. How do you limit your results to say, show only 5 latest tweets? instead of showing all 20?
AWESOME!!! Thanks man!
amazing job..i´ll delicious in my acc
Nice work!
Good work man,
thanks
Thank you! We only talked today about integrating our twitter account to our website.
:-)
Hey buddy your are the best....
Awesome friend... Thanks for your tuts...
It should be a closing div ;)
i agree with drewmclellan! but still a good idea though thanks for sharing!
Antonio, can you tell me how to add the "Share this post" links like you have at the end of each of your blog posts?
If it's not a secret of course! ;-) Thank you in advance!
Grande articolo, molto utile.
Grazie mille.
Marco
thanks
This is a very cool tutorial - I will be trying it out later in the week when I get home to my trusted computer :)
Thanks for posting it.
Wow, nice tutorial!
If it is possible, could you make a tutorial showing how to post and delete new tweets with this API and PHP?
I'm missing the part that creates those wonderful alternating row colors. No even/odd in the code I downloaded. I do appreciate the ease of use. I've been checking out
http://devzone.zend.com/article/4431
So far it has been easy to work with. Don't know if I'll get those alternating rows that I covet.
Super tutorials.
Can you help me?
I used your code -> error
Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in D:\phpbb source\xampplite\htdocs\twitter_woork\twitter.lib.php on line 510
Web server
# Apache/2.2.11 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.2.8
# MySQL client version: 5.1.30
Hau Nguyen
can you please answer to this question:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_CLASS in /home/hosting_users/ok50/www/twitter/status/twitter.lib.php on line 39
have a goodday.