Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

Hello all,
This will be a very brief blog post this evening as I have made an update to my Twitter Umbraco Package from a request from a tweet I received from Nisse Bryngfors.

His request was as follows

@warrenbuckley just tried the twitter package for umbraco.Great!Is there any way to display people you follow,instead of just your own feed?

I decided this was so easy to implement, I would make this quick update to my package and release it as soon as possible.

I have reposted the instructions below for people who didnt use my previous version.

This package installs the following files:

• bin/CWSHelperTwitter.dll
• xslt/CWS_twitterStatus.xslt
• /usercontrols/Installer/CWSTwitter/cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx

The installer usercontrol cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx is used to modify the /config/xsltExtensions.config
to setup my custom XSLT extension to allow us to modify the strange format of the twitter date format.

The actual package installs the following into umbraco:

• Macro: [XSLT] CWS:Display Twitter Status
• XSLT: CWS_twitterStatus.xslt

To use this package just install this package, to do this take the following steps.

1. Login to umbraco
2. Goto the Developer section
3. Right click the Macros node
4. Select Import Package
5. Press Browse and find the zip package file you have downloaded
6. Follow the steps in the wizard
7. Once installed insert the macro into your XHTML template
8. Insert your twitter id (not username), the number of items you want to display (upto 20) and check the box if you wish to include your friends tweets.

How do I find my Twitter user id?

You can find your twitter id by browsing to your twitter page, for example http://twitter.com/warrenbuckley and clicking on the RSS link at the bottom of the page. Which loads your RSS feed like this, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/9751992.rss
So in my case my Twitter user id is 9751992

Customisation

To customise the XHTML for the tweets display take a look at the XSLT file installed. This should be easy to read and edit, it is possible to modify your XSLT to include more things from the XML that twitter returns to us. How about the users real name, the users site it’s really upto you?

Check out the example XML files
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/9751992.xml
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/9751992.xml

Download

So without further-a-do here is the package for you to download.
Download Creative Website Specialist - Twitter Package v1.1.0