Twitter @Anywhere for Plone

plonesocial.twitter.anywhere is an addon for Plone which integrates Twitter @Anywhere into your Plone site.

It provides the auto linking and hovercard features which you can enable and disable as well as two portlets, one for displaying a Follow button and another one with a customizable tweetbox. More functionality might be added in the future.

Tutorial

Install plonesocial.twitter.anywhere in Plone

Look for your buildout.cfg and search for the following line:

[buildout]
...

eggs =
    ...

Add a new indented line to it like this:

eggs =
    ...
    plonesocial.twitter.anywhere

and rerun buildout:

bin/buildout -vv

(or without -vv in case you don’t need the additional debug output).

Then restart your Plone site.

Go to “Site Setup” and then to “Add-on Products” and install it.

Creating an application at Twitter

For using Twitter @Anywhere you first need to generate an API key which means registering an application on Twitter.

For this go to the Twitter @Anywhere Application Registration screen and enter the following details:

• A name for the application (free to choose)
• The location of your Plone site. This cannot be localhost but needs to be a real domain. Give the path to your Plone root.
• Enter your own Organization
• Enter a callback URL. This is not really needed but simply give the URL to your Plone site root (like above) and e.g. add /@@anywhere_callback (nothing is there at the moment though).
• optionally you can upload an icon for your application
• Make sure you selected “Read & Write” as the default access type.

Here is how it looks like:

After submitting the form you have to agree to the Terms of Service and then you will see the following screen:

You can either copy your API key out of the JavaScript call or you can go to “View your Applications” and click on your application to get the app screen:

Copy the API key into your clipboard.

Configuring your Plone site

Now go to your Plone site and choose Site Admin in the Admin menu (as it’s called in Plone 4, otherwise click on Plone Setup in Plone 3). You should see the Twitter @Anywhere Configuration link which you should click.

Now enter your API key and select if you want auto linking of @username links or if you want the hovercard effect on them.

Submit the form.

Now Twitter @Anywhere is configured for your Plone site. You can now start adding portlets.

The Twitter @Anywhere portlets

plonesocial.twitter.anywhere provides two portlets:

The Twitter Follow portlet

This portlet simply prints a “Follow @username on Twitte” button where you can configure which username to use. You can of course use multiple portlets of this type on one Plone site.

This is how the portlet looks:

The Tweetbox portlet

The Tweetbox portlet provides a box for sending out tweets. Those will be posted to the timeline of the user using the tweetbox.

You can configure the following settings per box:

• Box width and height depend on your Plone theme. The defaults should work well in the Plone 4 theme.
• The Label setting defines the title above the box. An empty field will produce the default label.
• The Contents settings holds a default text which is put into the tweetbox. E.g. you could put “RT @username ” there or add some default hashtags.
• The Counter settings defines if the character counter is displayed.

Credits

• Christian Scholz (cs@comlounge.net)

Development was sponsored by COM.lounge GmbH.

Source Code

The source code is available at http://bitbucket.org/mrtopf/plonesocial.twitter.anywhere/

Python Package

The package can be found at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plonesocial.twitter.anywhere/

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2010 COM.lounge GmbH

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.