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;
} 


[nyenius]

I just think is possible because everyone seems succeed installing this mod. It's strange that the problem seems different from one person and another.

ok I'll try the mod that you refer to. thanks

[cuco88]

Originally Posted by nyenius

first time I encountered this error, it was the bitly disabled. then I enabled it, still the same message. Is it the hosting configuration?

Yeah. This happens if your hoster has no JSON support for PHP.

Originally Posted by Videx

The problem is you're trying to use a mod that hasn't worked in a long time. Presumably because you neglected to read back a few posts and discover this fact. This is vital, especially when you can see from post #1 that the author hasn't been around for ages.

You can keep playing around trying to get this one to work, or you can just go use one that does: WS vBulletin Tweet Poster

Have you seen this post? https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=594 this plugin works!
And the plugin you mention will not work either for nyenius...

[nyenius]

I haven't try the 2nd mod yet, but i know what to do, i have to contact my hosting provider

[CubicWebs]

UN-Installed and installed another one.

[mrkati]

Hi I get this error when I open a new thread:

"Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_FUNCTION in C:\Inetpub\vhosts\miskiniz.com\httpdocs\bitly.php on line 80"

Any ieas?

[draver]

Sometimes i got an error message in my server log:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /var/www/xxx/includes/bitly.php on line 138, referer: http://www.meine-domain.de/newthread...newthread&f=17

How can i fix the problem?

[sticky]

Can this do twitter updates to different accounts from different forums?

Like an off topic twitter account for the off topic forum only for example?

[Videx]

Originally Posted by sticky

Can this do twitter updates to different accounts from different forums?

Like an off topic twitter account for the off topic forum only for example?

No.

[sticky]

Originally Posted by Videx

No.

Bummer, clumping everything in one account doesn't make too much sense for diverse forums.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by sticky

Bummer, clumping everything in one account doesn't make too much sense for diverse forums.

An interesting concept. Instead of instant notification via email, a sort of instant notification via Twitter. Probably nothing you couldn't do with hashtags though, without the need to set up a separate Twitter account for each forum.

I don't think it would work on our forum (a local community site). The users are barely able to understand the concept of email subscriptions. I seriously doubt many of them could handle some sort of Twitter client for that.

In my own case, It would work fine on my desktop where I have Trillian displaying tweets on my second monitor. But I rarely run Twitter when on mobile, so would be a huge fail compared to instant email notifications.