Update of automatic tweet plugin for Expression Engine

A while back I wrote about my plugin to automatically tweet about new blog posts in Expression Engine. Well, recently those of you who follow @f055 on Twitter might have observed that the announcement of my last blog post about Google Buzz was tweeted every couple of hours. That’s because there was a bug in my plugin.

Download the AutoTweet Plugin 1.1 for Expression Engine

This new version 1.1 fixes this problem of duplicate messages. Simply download the plugin, open the php file and change the Twitter username and password to your credentials. Then simply paste the following code to your feed template.

{exp:autotweet}
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}" limit="1" rdf="off" dynamic_start="on" disable="member_data|trackbacks"}
{title} {title_permalink="article"}
{/exp:weblog:entries}
{/exp:autotweet}

You can also create a separate template and set up a cron job that calls it every 30 minutes or so.

The problem was actually with Twitter. It sometimes goes in maintenance mode and returns a strange response instead of the timeline. The plugin couldn’t determine whether you already announced the message in question or not. Version 1.1 verifies the Twitter response and checks if it’s a valid timeline. Only then it can announce the post.

If you have ideas what more could be added here, just post in the comments. Enjoy!