Display recent Tweets in your WordPress site

More and more corporate sites are using Twitter these days and so you’re more likely to have a client who requires some sort of Twitter activity to be shown in his site. Perhaps he wants his most recent tweet displayed, or a few results from a Twitter search feed.

There are a number of Twitter based widgets and plugins, but in most cases, they’re heavily styled and don’t make it very easy for you to integrate a tweet or two into a very specific area in your design. The script below let’s you do just that and so it’s my method of choice.

Here’s a great and flexible script to grab some recent tweets for your WordPress site:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();

# load the RSS -- replace 'lylo' with your user of choice
if($doc->load('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/INSERT_USERNAME_HERE.rss')) {
 echo "<ul>\n";

 # number of <li> elements to display.  20 is the maximum
 $max_tweets = 10;

 $i = 1;
 foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
 # fetch the title from the RSS feed.
 # Note: 'pubDate' and 'link' are also useful (I use them in the sidebar of this blog)
 $tweet = $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;

 # the title of each tweet starts with "username: " which I want to remove
 $tweet = substr($tweet, stripos($tweet, ':') + 1);

 # OPTIONAL: turn URLs into links
 $tweet = preg_replace('@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@',
 '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $tweet);

 # OPTIONAL: turn @replies into links
 $tweet = preg_replace("/@([0-9a-zA-Z]+)/",
 "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$1\">@$1</a>",
 $tweet);

 echo "<li>". $tweet  . "</li>\n";

 if($i++ >= $max_tweets) break;
 }
 echo "</ul>\n";
}
?>

Remember that if your working of a busy site, it’s probably a good idea to integrate this with a caching system to avoid any problems with the Twitter API limits.