Building a new site today assumes that everything social should come with the box -- not even in it. Within the first question a client asks is how this whole twitter-thing works, and how he can use it. Of course Drupal provides modules to integrate with these, but what if you're stuck on a host "playing it safe" and sticking with PHP 5.1.6 ( that is, all RedHat, CentOS providers that won't use custom compiled packages )?
Well, Facebook isn't much of a problem, since the easiest way is to either create an app for that, if you feel like inventing the wheel at every possible turn (there doesn't seem to be a module to do that for your just yet), or simply provide an RSS feed to an existing consumer app ( I personally prefer Graffity RSS .
You can take a similar approarch with Twitter, by using twitterfeed , however in this case you also have the option of a module, which provides more options -- and we just love more control, don't we?
Setting the modules up is quite straight forward if you're using PHP 5.2 or higher. However, this blog is hosted on a CentOS server, with PHP 5.1.6 . This creates two major problems with all things social:
- they rely on JSON, which your provider will most likely not want to add ( the argument in my case was that since they've gone this long without it, most people will have installed custom solutions which would probably break if they did add it)
- the JSON wrappers available are not 100% like the original PHP function in terms of returned values
So, in my case, what needed to be done is add JSON functionality to my site in general ( always good to have it ), and patch up the Twitter module to work with it.
- To enable JSON, download the JSON wrapper script from here . To enable it for all of my Drupal installation, I did it the hacky way -- unzip and upload to the root of your site, add the line
require './jsonwrapper/jsonwrapper.php';
to the top of your index.php (right before the require_once statement), and most of your modules won't know the difference. - Twitter module however had some trouble with this - it was trying to access the returned data as an array, when it was returned as an object. Nothing to hard to fix, really -- just semantics. So, in order to keep it compatible, just patch the code at twitter.lib.php in two places.
- Around line 387, replace the entire constructor function with this block
public function __construct($values = array()) { if ( is_array($values) ) { $this->created_at = $values['created_at']; $this->id = $values['id']; $this->text = $values['text']; $this->source = $values['source']; $this->truncated = $values['truncated']; $this->favorited = $values['favorited']; $this->in_reply_to_status_id = $values['in_reply_to_status_id']; $this->in_reply_to_user_id = $values['in_reply_to_user_id']; $this->in_reply_to_screen_name = $values['in_reply_to_screen_name']; if (isset($values['user'])) { $this->user = new TwitterUser($values['user']); } } else { $this->created_at = $values->created_at; $this->id = $values->id; $this->text = $values->text; $this->source = $values->source; $this->truncated = $values->truncated; $this->favorited = $values->favorited; $this->in_reply_to_status_id = $values->in_reply_to_status_id; $this->in_reply_to_user_id = $values->in_reply_to_user_id; $this->in_reply_to_screen_name = $values->in_reply_to_screen_name; if (isset($values->user)) { $this->user = new TwitterUser($values->user); } } } } - Around line 475, replace the constructor function with this block
public function __construct($values = array()) { if ( is_array($values) ) { $this->id = $values['id']; $this->screen_name = $values['screen_name']; $this->name = $values['name']; $this->location = $values['location']; $this->description = $values['description']; $this->url = $values['url']; $this->followers_count = $values['followers_count']; $this->friends_count = $values['friends_count']; $this->statuses_count = $values['statuses_count']; $this->favourites_count = $values['favourites_count']; $this->protected = $values['protected']; $this->profile_image_url = $values['profile_image_url']; $this->profile_background_color = $values['profile_background_color']; $this->profile_text_color = $values['profile_text_color']; $this->profile_link_color = $values['profile_link_color']; $this->profile_sidebar_fill_color = $values['profile_sidebar_fill_color']; $this->profile_sidebar_border_color = $values['profile_sidebar_border_color']; $this->profile_background_image_url = $values['profile_background_image_url']; $this->profile_background_tile = $values['profile_background_tile']; $this->verified = $values['verified']; $this->created_at = $values['created_at']; if ($values['created_at'] && $created_time = strtotime($values['created_at'])) { $this->created_time = $created_time; } $this->utc_offset = $values['utc_offset']; if ($values['status']) { $this->status = new TwitterStatus($values['status']); } } else { $this->id = $values->id; $this->screen_name = $values->screen_name; $this->name = $values->name; $this->location = $values->location; $this->description = $values->description; $this->url = $values->url; $this->followers_count = $values->followers_count; $this->friends_count = $values->friends_count; $this->statuses_count = $values->statuses_count; $this->favourites_count = $values->favourites_count; $this->protected = $values->protected; $this->profile_image_url = $values->profile_image_url; $this->profile_background_color = $values->profile_background_color; $this->profile_text_color = $values->profile_text_color; $this->profile_link_color = $values->profile_link_color; $this->profile_sidebar_fill_color = $values->profile_sidebar_fill_color; $this->profile_sidebar_border_color = $values->profile_sidebar_border_color; $this->profile_background_image_url = $values->profile_background_image_url; $this->profile_background_tile = $values->profile_background_tile; $this->verified = $values->verified; $this->created_at = $values->created_at; if ($values->created_at && $created_time = strtotime($values->created_at)) { $this->created_time = $created_time; } $this->utc_offset = $values->utc_offset; if ($values->status) { $this->status = new TwitterStatus($values->status); } } } - All done!
- Around line 387, replace the entire constructor function with this block
- Alternatively, you can just download the patched library file from here.