Miscellaneous Hacks - vBulletin to Twitter, live tweets of new threads

This should work on all 4 and 3 versions of vBulletin as it's trivial.

Description:

You start a new thread, this hack makes a tweet about it on your twitter account.

This are live updates... not delayed, not based on RSS... the instant the thread is started, a tweet is made. This is how this hack differs from other hacks.

Why:

Mostly for SEO, but also as an alert system.

For SEO the idea is simply that search engines are drinking from the Twitter firehose and are indexing the links that are tweeted. Faster and increased indexing of your site benefits you by helping it be found.

For alerts it means that users are able to use whatever twitter client they wish to obtain updates. A lot of these provide filtering capabilities, so they're able to get a live filtered stream of updates that interest them. This works very well when you also use thread prefixes.

Pre-requisites:

You should have an account on bit.ly for URL shortening, and you should have an account on Twitter.

Go and register if you haven't yet:
http://bit.ly/
http://twitter.com/

Installation:

NOTE: Most problems are related to not putting your bit.ly or twitter user details in the plugin. Follow the instructions carefully!

Upload the two attached files to your forum root. These are twitter and bitly classes that enable the hack to work, you can also download these from the author:
http://classes.verkoyen.eu/bitly
http://classes.verkoyen.eu/twitter/

Go to the plugin manager and create a new plugin with the following details:
Product: vBulletin
Hook: newthread_post_complete
Title: Tweet to Twitter

PHP Code: [See below]

To configure the PHP code you need to know your bit.ly API key (go get it from bit.ly/account) and your username and password for twitter.

You also should make a list of the forumIds that are non-public as you will want to put these in the array provided.

i.e. if your admin forum is forumId = 7 and you also have a private forum for regular members which is forumid = 12, then you will want this:
$excludedForums = array(7, 12);

The PHP code should be this, with all of the relevant values for your forum inserted (replace everything bolded, including the < and > bits):

PHP Code:

// The array below are the ids of non-public forums, update these to be your admin forum ids or anything non-public by default
$excludedForums = array(0);

// If you are having trouble getting bitly URL shortening to work... disable it!
$useBitly = true;

if (!in_array($foruminfo[forumid], $excludedForums)) {
    $shortUrl = 'http://www.yourforumsdomain.com/showthread.php?t='.$newpost[threadid];

    if ($useBitly) {
      // http://classes.verkoyen.eu/bitly
      require_once 'bitly.php';
      $bitly = new Bitly('<bit.ly username>', '<bit.ly API key>');
      $shortUrl = $bitly->shorten($shortUrl);
    }

    $tweet = '';
    if (isset($newpost['prefixid']) && $newpost['prefixid'] != '') {
        $tweet = $vbphrase['prefix_'.$newpost['prefixid'].'_title_plain'].' ';
    }
    $tweet .= $newpost['title'].' '.$shortUrl;

    // http://classes.verkoyen.eu/twitter/
    require_once 'twitter.php';
    $twitter = new Twitter('<twitter username>','<twitter password>');
    $twitter->updateStatus($tweet);
} 


So the bit.ly line might look like this after you've put your values in:
$bitly = new Bitly('testUser', 'R_hj3456hgf3hig56hi2gf6');
NOT
$bitly = new Bitly('<testUser>', '<R_hj3456hgf3hig56hi2gf6>');
See? Remove those <> bits, they just show what to replace.

The shortUrl line might look like this:
$shortUrl = 'http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t='.$newpost[threadid];

The Twitter line might look like this:
$twitter = new Twitter('stephenfry','op1umisn1ce');

All make sense?

And that's it. Save and activate the plugin and create a test thread.

Now whenever a new thread is started, a tweet will be made to twitter instantly.

You can see this in effect here:
http://twitter.com/lfgss

That is being pushed new threads for http://www.lfgss.com/ and it's working perfectly.

Any questions?

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q: It doesn't work!

A: That's not a question, however if it doesn't work then it's extremely likely you got your username and passwords wrong or left the < > signs in there. Double-check and do it again.

Q: I see an "INVALID_JSON" error

A: Disable bitly by setting $useBitly to false.
Q: I see an "You must be authenticated to access shorten" error

A: The credentials that you entered are either wrong, or you made a mess of the syntax. You did remove the < > when you put your values in right? Did you check the example given above?

Q: I see an error that says "Warning: curl_setopt_array() [function.curl-setopt-array]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in [path]/bitly.php"

A: Wow, that's a good one... but easily fixable. Insert this at line 136 (just after the CURL options) in bitly.php:

PHP Code:

$no_hack_needed = (ini_get('safe_mode') !== '1' && ini_get('open_basedir') === false);
if ($no_hack_needed) {
  $options[CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION] = true;
} else {
  $options[CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION] = false;
  $options[CURLOPT_HEADER] = true;
} 


[steeler7]

Originally Posted by lhridley

I've been really surprised at the number of people posting about issues with Bit.ly. It took me all of five minutes to set up my account with them and get that working. I've had many more issues with the mod itself.

For example, it doesn't check to see if the title of a thread exceeds the 140 character length allowed for a tweet -- this causes an Exception error to be thrown that's not captured and handled anywhere -- which is fine for a programmer ,but doesn't really help an end user when they see a screen dump of gobbledygook in response to submitting a thread with a long title.

:/

Was there something that needed to be done at bit.ly that I missed? Threads from my board are going to bit.ly and can be seen on the "home" section of my account. If I click "share" it'll send it to my Twitter account with no problems... I obviiously have the Twitter account set up at bit.ly or I wouldn't be able to share it.... It seems like there's something that's not having it automatically go to Twitter.

[sqzdog]

I am missing the response, or the author has not responded.

My board is not a heavy use board so I want to be able to tweet EVERY POST, not just new threads.

Can this be done?

[sqzdog]

Steeler7, did you check to make sure you included your twitter url in the plugin you created?

[steeler7]

Originally Posted by sqzdog

Steeler7, did you check to make sure you included your twitter url in the plugin you created?

Here's my code... I've looked over it a bunch of times maybe you can see something I screwed up...

PHP Code:

// The array below are the ids of non-public forums, update these to be your admin forum ids or anything non-public by default
$excludedForums = array(1,2,3,35,36,37,38,39,40,43);

// If you are having trouble getting bitly URL shortening to work... disable it!
$useBitly = true;

if (!in_array($foruminfo[forumid], $excludedForums)) {
    $shortUrl = 'http://www.pittsburghsportstavern.com/forum/showthread.php?t='.$newpost[threadid];

    if ($useBitly) {
      // http://classes.verkoyen.eu/bitly
      require_once 'bitly.php';
      $bitly = new Bitly('kipper51', 'R_**************');
      $shortUrl = $bitly->shorten($shortUrl);
    }

    $tweet = '';
    if (isset($newpost['prefixid']) && $newpost['prefixid'] != '') {
        $tweet = $vbphrase['prefix_'.$newpost['prefixid'].'_title_plain'].' ';
    }
    $tweet .= $newpost['title'].' '.$shortUrl;

    // http://classes.verkoyen.eu/twitter/
    require_once 'twitter.php';
    $twitter = new Twitter('pghsportstavern','********');
    $twitter->updateStatus($tweet);
} 


[sqzdog]

Yours looks identical to mine except for the forum exclusions. I put a space after each comma. Don't know if that would even affect it.

[Pro-eSports.com]

Originally Posted by Pro-eSports.com

Do I have to enter the sub-forum ID's too or are the main forum ID's enough?
Do category ID's work too?

I also have another question. I only want to tweet a few of my forums, is there a code that instead of the excluded forums I can enter the included forums? Would be easier for a site with many forums.

[steeler7]

does this need a specific version of php? Im using 5.1.6 and couldn't use the Tweet Poster mod because it required php 5.2.3 or higher.

just curious

[Majora]

what do I have to insert after

PHP Code:

// loop parameters and add them to the queryString
            foreach($aParameters as $key => $value) $queryString .= '&'. $key .'='. urlencode(utf8_encode($value)); 


to rewrite ??? etc...

Best regards,
Majora

[sqzdog]

does this need a specific version of php? Im using 5.1.6 and couldn't use the Tweet Poster mod because it required php 5.2.3 or higher.

just curious

I don't know. I'm running 5.2.8

[steeler7]

Originally Posted by sqzdog

just curious

I don't know. I'm running 5.2.8

Hmmm...

anyone else running php 5.1.6 or lower? I'm talking with my host to upgrade but they said something about conflicts with plesk being an issue (I think they're trying to scare me off from forcing them to do work..lol)