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;
} 


[Bob_R]

Originally Posted by Videx

Assuming you aren't on dedicated servers, I hope you both immediately opened tickets with your hosts asking this same question? We need to know exactly what they're doing to break things and how to fix it.

They've never given a definite answer. Everyone's passing the buck. But the mod doesn't work for me.

safe_mode is disabled. I have Json and Curl compiled.

What else can it be?????????

[Bob_R]

OK here's the latest. I submitted a test thread and it went thru with no errors and is on my site.

But, it didn't tweet to twitter?

It's supposed to be instanteneous (sp?) right?

I wouldn't even have to wait any amount of time?

Thanks!!

Execution Order Use this field to enter the order in which code at the same hook will be executed. What should this number be?

[clubplanet]

Great mod, thanks!

A couple of things to note:

1. Make sure you download all the PHP code. I missed the bracket at the end and got the error:
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in

2. Download the bitly.php file from this thread not from the URL linked in the post. The link is newer and does not work properly. It gives you the word "Array" rather than the bit.ly URL.

[Bob_R]

Originally Posted by clubplanet

Great mod, thanks!

A couple of things to note:

1. Make sure you download all the PHP code. I missed the bracket at the end and got the error:
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in

2. Download the bitly.php file from this thread not from the URL linked in the post. The link is newer and does not work properly. It gives you the word "Array" rather than the bit.ly URL.

Got all of that. Still doesn't work. See post 372

Now it's not even going to my bit.ly.

[Sparrow-Sean]

Seems to work fine with the latest vBulletin and I followed the correct procedures

[Bob_R]

Actually the only thing I did find out is that the actual server software my webhost uses is LiteSpeed instead of Apache, in most cases this will not cause an issue since LiteSpeed is far superior than Apache.

I followed all directions, do not get errors, but do not see the post happening on Twitter.

Posted several tests then deleted them.

[YouTubeVZ]

Dont work ?!?!?!?!?!?!

[betts02]

Had to uninstall

Put everything in the correct place but when i activate the forumblock i get fatal errors

[iguano]

Turn off, i get errores every new thread :-(

[betts02]

Originally Posted by iguano

Turn off, i get errores every new thread :-(

Exactly the same mate, looked good but had to turn it off