vBulletin 2 Twitter - Take Your News Straight To Twitter!
 

vBulletin2 Twitter Courtesy A Health Forum http://ahealthforum.com
Special Thanks to Jarvis From http://seovb.com for help
vbtotwitt.php copyright Vojtech Semecky released under the terms of GPL
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This modification will take one of your latest news threads and post it directly to your twitter account. You must have RSS enabled for this modification to work. You can specify a forum to pull the content from using external.php?f=FORUMID

The RSS feed will post your thread title directly into your Twitter account, and then create a link back using TinyURL. The links are automatically converted into tinyurl.com links via the TinyURL API


Install instructions

1. Upload the includes folder into your forum root. This will automatically place the 2 scripts need to operate this into the "includes/cron/" folder
2. Install the product-ahealthforumcomvbtwit.xml file via the Product Manager in your adminCP
3. Navigate to vBulletin Options -> vBulletin Options -> vBulletin 2 Twitter and enter your name and password.
4. Hit Save and Wait 2 minutes
5. View your twitter account to confirm that an update was posted.
6. Enter the URL to your forum feed.

Notice: By default for testing purposes this makes one tweet announcing you've installed vB2Twitter You are free to delete this tweet as it is for testing purposes only!!!!

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vBulletin 2 Twitter Options

1. Twitter Username: This is your Twitter.com username. If you don't have one yet, you can get one for free at http://twitter.com

2. Twitter Password: This is your password for your twitter account. Notice that its not hashed or encypted so anyone with adminCP access can view it. If you can't trust those who have your AdminCP information with such details, then this mod isn't for you sorry.

3. Feed URL: This can be to any sites feed if you want, but I suggest pointing it to your news forum and creating a prefix such as [Breaking News] to make the most of this. Your twitter posts will then be prefixed with [Breaking News] Thread Title link to thread.

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Again, this modification will take the latest thread from the forum RSS feed you specify. I don't beleive in spamming on twitter with useless crap, so I've made this modification to only take one thread at a time from your forums RSS feed.


Trouble Shooting:

If it does not automatically update to your account. Go into the scheduled tasks manage and run the task manually.

external.php gives a blank page. Enable RSS from your vBulletin Admin Control Panel.

Reserved

not working

I'm using zoints-seo, and i get "Error: RSS file not found, dude." when i use the scheduled task...

FYI, this can be done without a modification by placing the RSS feed of your forum into twitterfeed.com I do this myself for one of my more popular forums. It can also do all forums as well.

thanx for this.

-1 cron-job in my vB

Won't work for me either. I'm using the RSS feed /external.php?type=RSS2 which displays all open nonrestricted forum posts and this plugin may require the forum code only.

I've resorted to using the twitterfeed.com for now but it only post a maximum of 5 messages every 30mins so at busy time messages will be missed.

Any chance of an update to get this working as the popularity of Twitter is growing fast and my users want this feature.

Note this is my first posts here in 2 years as I've never has the need to ask something that wasn't already answered a million times before but Twitter is pretty new and we need more plugins. The Twitter on Profile pages works brilliantly though.

Some tips to help get it working.

Make sure your server has cURL installed or it may not work correctly.

After installing and you enter your RSS feed location. Go to the forum where you selected the RSS feed come from and make a fast post in there.

vBulletin Scheduled tasks don't seem to run every minute for some reason, so it may take a few minutes for it to update to twitter

I just uninstalled on my forums, and reinstalled following the instructions and it still works okay: http://twitter.com/healthforum Feel free to register an account at health forums and make a test post to see.

Twitterfeed.com does only run the Cronjob every 30 Minutes...

@AHealthForum:
1. Could you advertise a little bit less inside your product? "HealthForum" everywhere annoys me. ;)

2. This mod always posts the last RSS-item into my Twitter Account. It doesn't care that the item is two weeks old and that it have been posted before.

My Twitter profile looked like that:
- "News from 2.03.09"
- "Some other handmade Twit"
- "News from 2.03.09"

not working, thank you :confused:

Its not every where? And sure next time i create a product and share i'll keep your feelings in mind ;)

This is does do, I haven't been able to find a work around, but i haven't actively looked for one yet either as I just use my twitter account to post updates from the forums and this is good enough for that :D

:up:

Your welcome?

Didn't work for me either.
Ran the scheduled task manually and got an error message posted to my twitter page.
Uninstalled for now.

Make sure your have your RSS enabled on your forums, and cURL support on the server.

This may also only work with PHP5 as i haven't tested on PHP4 yet


I'm in the process of moving to a another hosting company that should let me test this in PHP4 and PHP5 to see if that maybe a problem for some users.

I get wrong TinyURL.com link.

this exported something to twitter, but didn't do it properly.

what was tweeted was
is there something i can do to fix that?

I'm not sure, i've never seen it include that.

Try viewing your RSS feed in the browser and see if thats the title.

If not, try deleting the tweet, and then waiting for it to update again.

sorry for my dumbness but how do i "Enable RSS from your vBulletin Admin Control Panel." i cant find it

Thanks

AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> External Data provider

Nice one thanks works Ace <3:up:

Thanks, glad to hear its working for others, thought i was going crazy and it only worked for me. :rolleyes:

Well am no pro but this is my twitter page >>> http://twitter.com/animeisland <<<
Looks good to me Thanks

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I've set it up to just read my news forum. When I view what is in that feed, I see the following:

http://www.bostonlove.org/forums/external.php?f=28

There's no sign of that "cdata" code in there.

Here's the actual twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/bostonlove

Wow! Thanks for the tip!

nice idea, I'll have to check this out sometime

it does work with PHP4 i have it working on my site, it only posted 1 post though and i put the main RSS feed for the entire forum, there should be more posts posted though.. well see

I just set it up for my site and it works perfectly. Much better than twitterfeed.

Thanks so much for this!!

It only takes your latest forum post one at a time. So whatever the last RSS feed post is, this will be your tweet when the RSS updates.

Great glad to hear! I have to agree as well since this will let you do an unlimited amount by setting the cron to constantly run. A lot more flexibility imo by setting different cron times

Update: I've been using this mod since released here, which was the same day I created the Twitter account and I have 62 followers and my traffic has increased about 40%. And i've only posted 3-4 tweets myself :D

Does this support multiple forum ids?

btw, how is this different than using twitfeed?
http://twitterfeed.com/

cheers

What I am seeing is it is posting the same thread over and over even if there is no new post there since the last RSS update. I am doing something wrong?

http://twitter.com/DomainNameForum

This doesn't limit you to X amount per hour.

Doesn't rely on 3rd party site that could go down

Cheers

Yes, you can put whatever forum ID you want in the RSS feed URL

Change the time in between the task.

AdminCP -> Scheduled Tasks -> vBulletin 2 Twitter

Thank you!

One more question, using on a different site than mentioned above. If I manually run it from scheduled tasks it works. If I don't, it never pulls the feed on it's own. Any thoughts?

Thanks For This.

make sure you're getting visitors to your site and that $cronimage is in your footer.

You could also try to edit the cron times so it only runs once every 10 minutes or so rather then once a minute.