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 momon

This is for ppl reporting problems with json still, after reading through the thread, this post in particular finally solved things for me and the plugin is working wonderfully now.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...=234288&page=7

Where? After line 136?

[carrlos]

Installed. Works perfectly.

An "include" forums option would be great for those of us who have less forums we'd like to include than exclude.

[Bob_R]

I actually got it to work except for one little thing.

When you click the shortened link (is.gd) on Twitter you're directed to my site and and get this message:

No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator

[Videx]

Originally Posted by carrlos

An "include" forums option would be great for those of us who have less forums we'd like to include than exclude.

Simply remove the bang (! - exclamation point) from the line near the beginning to make it an inclusion list.

if (!in_array($foruminfo[forumid...

[jbd]

Still getting the error "cannot view XML input using xsl stylesheet"... Sounds like something simple. Any ideas?

[Videx]

Originally Posted by jbd

Still getting the error "cannot view XML input using xsl stylesheet"... Sounds like something simple. Any ideas?

I believe that's a viewer problem. Can you verify you've tried viewing the feed in several different browsers? Do they all give you the same error?

[kefallon]

Look i know i should check the preceding 27 pages but could someone in the know tell me if this issue is fixed yet??

statuses/update.xml Could not authenticate you. Unauthorized on line 229 in /var/www/vhosts/ionian-island.co.uk/httpdocs/forums/twitter.php
#0 /var/www/vhosts/ionian-island.co.uk/httpdocs/forums/twitter.php(648): Twitter->doCall('statuses/update...', Array, true)
#1 /var/www/vhosts/ionian-island.co.uk/httpdocs/forums/newthread.php(262) : eval()'d code(26): Twitter->updateStatus('test http://www...')
#2 /var/www/vhosts/ionian-island.co.uk/httpdocs/forums/newthread.php(262): eval()
#3 {main}

if not any other suggestions i would really like to get the ability to tweet messages from my board working.

[jbd]

was using IE... I didn't try in another browser. Obv it would be useless if it only worked in Firefox anyway. But I am sure it is supposed to work in IE and there is something else going on here. I am using a custom skin on my forum, but then most of us probably are. Maybe it is something to do with the doctype specified in some of the CSS templates, or something similar? Just a guess. Any ideas welcomed...

[Videx]

Originally Posted by jbd

was using IE... I didn't try in another browser. Obv it would be useless if it only worked in Firefox anyway.

Clearly you missed my point entirely, and apparently you aren't used to testing things in different browsers. Sorry, but that's not how forum administration works. You need to immediately install Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera and get used to trying things out in a few of them, both logged in and not logged in.

In this particular case you would have immediately seen that the problem is not with vb or this mod. OTOH, if you saw this in every reader you tried, I'd say we need a link to try it for ourselves.

And to kefallon: No, I don't think there has ever been a good solution to Twitter "could not authenticate" errors. But I wouldn't take my word for it and would slog through all the pages anyway.

[Bob_R]

Originally Posted by imported_nimbus

Let me share my solution.

bitly.php:
I set the following Curl options:
$options[CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION] = false;
$options[CURLOPT_HEADER] = false;

and for twitter.php:
$options[CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION] = false;

Then all error messages gone!

Sure it's not true for the first and third one?

Still doesn't work. :down: