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;
} 


[merk_aus]

Any assistance in getting this for the CMS only with Articles?

[Crazyfruitbat]

yeah I'm after the cms one too - that is way more important that twittering forum posts on my site

[pant]

The main concern should be to get this working with openauth or whatever you call it otherwise you can forget the CMS tweets altogether.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by Crazyfruitbat

yeah I'm after the cms one too - that is way more important that twittering forum posts on my site

In our case most of our articles are promoted from the forums so have already been tweeted. New articles are usually bumped in the forums so get tweeted. No real need just to tweet a new article by itself.

[merk_aus]

Originally Posted by Videx

In our case most of our articles are promoted from the forums so have already been tweeted. New articles are usually bumped in the forums so get tweeted. No real need just to tweet a new article by itself.

Maybe not for you but for those of us who run a news service with the message board there for fun there is a point.

Our articles are written into the CMS. Users who want to hang around after reading can then go to the forums and posts etc.

[puppetmaster222]

Is there any fix for when Twitter is over capacity? I get gnarly looking failed database messages when it's over-cap and I try to post a thread. Turning it off for now even though it is a nice mod. I rather just not risk the site looking like it totally died on new members making Intro threads or something.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by merk_aus

Our articles are written into the CMS.

Didn't this just come up somewhere? The CMS is just another forum, isn't it? All articles there start a thread in the CMS forum vBCms Comments. So why can't you tweet this forum? Maybe if it was unhidden?

[AURFSCAN]

Heres an error and Im assuming the attached image is the culprit. Apart from this happening once ...everthing works as it should thx

Bad Gateway on line 229 in /home/********/public_html/twitter.php
#0 /home/********/public_html/twitter.php(648):
Twitter->doCall('statuses/update...', Array, true)
#1 /home/********/public_html/newthread.php(262) : eval()'d code(26):
Twitter->updateStatus('Greetings (my i...')
#2 /home/********/public_html/newthread.php(262): eval()
#3 {main}


Warning: Invalid error type specified in [path]/vb/vb.php on line 284

[cronjob78]

A cool option would be if seperate forums could be assigned to seperate tweets rather than just being able to exclude certain forums. The forum I admin has very diverse sub-forums so anyone interested in music doesn't want sports tweets and vice versa.

I tried to be clever and rename the .xml file and rename the productID and <title> in the file itself. It imports fine but doesn't show up in admincp->settings alongside the first copy which is a bit perplexing.

If anyone has a suggestion I'd love to hear it.

Might be something worth considering to include in the hack for the future.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by AURFSCAN

Heres an error and Im assuming the attached image is the culprit.

Ha. That's Twitter's "Fail whale". Their servers have been overwhelmed by the World Cup. Word is that they're going to have to take the whole thing down for a while soon to implement changes.

Originally Posted by cronjob78

A cool option would be if seperate forums could be assigned to seperate tweets rather than just being able to exclude certain forums

No doubt the mod can use a lot of improvement. But you might have better luck posting over at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=236278 where it's an actual mod, not just a code hack. Be advised he charges for support, but if he can do this I bet others may help you pay for it.