hubzilla_ynh/sources/addons/twitter

Twitter Plugin

Warning: Because Twitter currently blocks ur1.ca links, tweets with these links are not accepted by Twitter. This means that you can only crosspost short messages to Twitter. Other link shortening services didn't seem to work at all, so #pleaseFIX! [BTW: the question is if we need link shortening, because Twitter has its own nowadays.]

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Original main authors Tobias Diekershoff and Michael Vogel. Adapted for the Hubzilla by Mike Macgirvin.

With this addon for the Hubzilla you can give your hub members 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 hub.

There is a similar addon for forwarding public messages to GNU social (formerly StatusNet).

Requirements

To use this plugin you have to register an application for your Hubzilla hub 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 API 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 Red-addons 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 the command line 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 API key and API 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

• Go to the root of your Hubzilla installation and type after the prompt:

  util/config system addon

• Press enter. You get a list of active addons. To activate this addon you have to add Twitter to this list and press enter:

  util/config system addon "plugin 1, plugin 2, etc, twitter"

• Afterwards you need to add your OAuth API key / secret pair the same way (without the single quotes):

  util/config twitter consumerkey 'your API KEY here'

  util/config twitter consumersecret 'your API SECRET here'

Connector Options for the Channel

When the OAuth API information is correctly entered into the admin configuration and a channel owner 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 and this channel has the privilege to cross-post their public posts to Twitter.

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

• Allow posting to Twitter If a channel owner wants to post their public postings to the associated Twitter account, they need to check this box.
• Send public postings to Twitter by default If a channel owner wants to have all their public postings being send to the associated Twitter account they need to check this button as well. Otherwise they have to enable the relay of their postings in the ACL dialog (click the lock button) before posting an entry.
• Clear OAuth configuration If a channel owner wants to remove the currently associated Twitter account from their Hubzilla channel they have to check this box and then hit the submit button. The saved settings will be deleted and they have to reconfigure the Twitter connector to be able to relay their public postings to a Twitter account.

License

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