Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

Nice plugin, I still get a lot of comments from people who don’t use Gravatar but do use Twitter.

Thank you Smashing for publishing this plugin and users for the good comments you have been giving. :)

Very nice job! Thanks!

Nice work, keep smashing :-)

@Vitaly, that is an interesting approach. What happens if Twitter is down, it just finds the gravatar instead?

That’s great!
TNX!

Sounds nice, but here’s what I get after activating it and placing the code:

Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /public_html/wp-content/plugins/twittar/twittar.php on line 178

Looks cool. I’m going to give it a try.

@Karolis Pocius: yes, you will need to have cURL (libcurl) support in your PHP for this to work. You might try asking your host for this. If you have a dedicated server, installing it should be easy.

Nice? Does anybody find Twitter not cool? Like me?

Thanx! Will give it a go.

I agree with Chris that the amount of http requests this results in is unacceptable. I would however build in server-side caching. This will result in the best client side performance and it will also result in less load on the Twitter servers. That way everyone wins.

@Chris Heilmann (#25) & @Marco (#26):

Yeah. I thought about that too. However i wasnt able to come up with good solutions. I liked yours and will work to implement them :)

@Chris W. (#12):

Yes it will load gravatar instead.

@Bella Casa (#15):

Thanks. Anything i can help you with about instructions?

Hope you enjoy it anyways.

Thanks

Anyway this could work by Twitter name and not by email address?

@Chris Wallace (#31):

Can you explain better what you mean? :)

Thanks

Love it – will be implementing asap.

Kristen (#33):

If it is getting the images from your blog it isn’t (but remember that user must input the twitter mail :) ). So if you don’t mind can you share your blog adress so i can check?

Thanks

Brilliant :)

Thanks
Alex

Testing…

I don’t know why peoples use twitter?…

Anyways Thanks for sharing.

Regards
Omair Rais
http://www.omairarts.com

Also, could it not use the twitter username rather than an email address?

Check out http://chinposin.com/ for more twitter avatar madness, you might be able to tie into that somehow too!

Very nice plugin, and good post. :)

@Simon (#43):

Sorry but it must be implemented throught Template the way the is right now. I will try to make something sweet that let you add it as a wordpress default avatar system so new wp themes already support without hacks but right now that is the way it works. Anyway you shoulnd’t be worried. Those are not risky hacks.

Regarding username: It could but for me it doen’t make much sense because you would need a extra input field which is unnecessary. Anyway if you would like it drop me a mail throught http://www.ricardojrsousa.com

Best Regards

This plugin looks nice, when I examine the code, however, I realize that it sends a query per comment to the Twitter server. Did you know that Twitter only allows 100 request per hour. So if any post that has 20 comments is visited by 5 people than Twitter will block my web server for that hour period. Therefore this plugin is not usable right now. The plug-in must cache twitter avatars or urls for each email address, probably in database. You need to work on it Ricardo, it is useless now.

@Kristen (#49):

Will try to understand what is the issue and will get back to you.

@Baturalp (#50):

Frankly i didn’t knew that but as i said in reply to previous comment i recognize that this is not the most efficient way even it being “a way”.
I will add cache support to it ASAP.

@John (#51):
Is a idea :) Can be worked out. The main idea of the plugin was to be “as simple as possible” but it can be improved to get better performance and more options. I’m working on it ok? :)

Best Regards

@Ricardo Sousa – Great idea for a plugin, to extend on what Baturalp was talking about it would be good to add in database support so that while twitter is up and accepting links.

The biggest issue that you will have is that people change their avatars on a regular basis so even if you cache or database the images, you will still have issues with updating each avatar when a twitter user changes it.

Here is what I propose, because Twitter allows the 100 per hour API request you could initially grab the images for user comments (as requested from page views) as it does now, insert them into the database then set a part of the script to either incrementally grab the commenter images again over midnight (local time to the server wordpress install) in 100 user at a time blocks (this is inefficient) or to have the plugin re-grab the commenter image on next post (which is much more efficient and puts less load on twitter and web server).

Of course the latter would also need to be described as a limitation due to twitter’s current API allowances.

The third option to yourself is talk to Twitter…
Because you aren’t requesting the actual IM text from a tweet and only grabbing the image for a specific twitter user they may work with you to come up with a more viable solution (they have done this in the past).

All I can say it is an awesome start and good luck in updating it!

I should include that “cache” does not mean to save a piece of information forever, contrarily it should save information for a limited period of time, like @Regravity said. Because original data might change in time. Therefore you should decide the timeout period for caching, which must not exhaust people’s web server. On the other hand, you should treat nice to twitter’s servers. :)

Good luck!

testing to see if this does work

The showUser() requires an e-mail address, but trackback comments without e-mail addresses pull up someone’s Twitter avatar. Adding a check for this on line 34 fixes the problem.

@aNieto2k (#61):

Thanks. After release that first version i found that and is added on top of version 2.0 that will be released soon with new features and total controll of settings from backend. Anyway this tip is only valid to recent templates. Must of them don’t even use gravatar neither the get_avatar function.
I will add all the options and change the documentation.

Thank you very much.

I will reply to other questions as soon as i get home as i am out right now.

Thank you all and wait while i talk to twitter regarding the newest versiont that i promisse will be much better.

Ricardo

@Regravity(#54) & @Baturalp(#56):

Regarding your informations i’m thankful for them.
I’m working with twitter (i mailed them) in order to find a solution. Cache will be added (actually it is already added) but the question here is to find an efficient way to make the updates. I’m thinking about create a dummy twitter account. Login will be encrypted and we log on twitter before doing the updates. This account will have (i’m hoping) no limits or better ones.
So the plugin will load the img adress when the user make the comment and then update in a certain date & time. The big question here is if i can know remotly when the photo is updated. Working on better solutions and willing to hear from you users, as we speak.

Thanks

I have made a litter modification for this plugin to have database support.

I still can’t get the plugin to work on my blog, no matter which theme I use. Is it possible that Twittar isn’t compatible with another one of my plugins?

I’m having a trouble. I set the plugin correctly, but the placeholder image for a users that has not twitter or gravatar is still the gravatar default.

I want use a custom placeholder image and gravatar too compatibility. The params i use are the followings:

twittar(48, “http://www.skyflash.it/wp-content/themes/freshnews/images/gravatar.jpg”, “#cccccc”, “gravatar”, 1, “”)

@Ricardo: sure! Mi blog is http://tinyurl.com/7n7h6c
For better explanation, i left both images:
the first column is the gravatar built on the blog template. You may see the default icon i’m using and some gravatar users.
The second column is the twittar plugin. You may see some icons from twitter users AND a gravatar default icon which is not that i declared in the plugin activation code.

If i use “0″ instead of “1″ in the usegravatar option, the default icon is good, but i lose the gravatar compatibility

P.S.: may i suggest an “alt” function in the plugin, wich displays a message like “Come see my $twitterprofile and follow me!” when the mouse hovers the icon?

Solved! Was a my mistake! I’ve forgot the ” ” for the size parameter.

@Ricardo (#71): Just figured out the problem this morning! I finally figured out how to upgrade my host to PHP 5.0 and it solved a few minor problems I was having. Might be useful information for troubleshooting other users in the future.

The plugin is working great now, thank you!

@DoctorFu:

Hope to have one till the end of the week.

Cheers

Thank you very much for this interesting Plug-In. I think, I`ll try it out.
Greetings
Boris

I’ve installed the plugin but am unable to get the twitter avatars to show up…

The default and gravatar images work… the twitter ones do not.

I’ve tested this by changing my email address on one of the comments to match my email address used on twitter.

I’m also using php5

Any ideas on what could be wrong?

fascinating and informative, but would make something more on this topic?

This plugin is great. It was working under WP 2.7 but no longer works under WP 2.7.1 Any intentions on updating it?

Are you using this plugin?

Cool

Is this plugin still being developed?

Looks like a great plugin, I’ll be using it on my site soon :-)

yeah!

I really like this idea, but can’t get it work on my site with wordpress 2.7.1. Any plans for an update?

Great idea. Have to see it working to say more.

Hi, I just can’t make it work. It gets the gravatar image but not the Twitter image.

This could be an interesting addition to the blog. I’ll check it out some more. Does it slow down the blog page load at all?

Fantastic…gonna try it

thank you, that is exactly what i was looking for

Is it magic ?

我试验一下

Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/user/public_html/wp-content/plugins/twittar/twittar.php on line 178

And you haven’t bothered to update the plugin since January, despite promises to the contrary.

FAIL.

YEAH! I’ve found it buut now my Twitter avatar is not being displayed. ¬¬

It’s working because if I set the “usegravatar” parameter to (int)0 I don’t see a friend’s avatar, but if i set it to true boolean way I do see her gravatar, but it’s not her Twitter avatar.

I used my email in a comment but my Twitter avatar is not displayed.

I just realized your plugin is not going to work as long as Twitter doesn’t want to take that parameter.

USELESS. sorry to say that.

You know, I could just change your plugin name and keep all the credit, but here’s your fix bro!

Find in wp-content/plugins/twittar/twittar.php and change this:

function showUser($id){
// Will arrange the url we need to open @ twitter to get the photo info
$request = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/show.xml?email='.urlencode($id).'';
// Will open another function that will do all the hard work :)
return process($request);
}

for this:

function showUser($id){
$id = explode('@', $id);
$id = $id[0];
// Will arrange the url we need to open @ twitter to get the photo info
$request = 'http://twitter.com/users/'.strval($id).'.xml';
// Will open another function that will do all the hard work :)
return process($request);
}


Links or credits are welcomed. ( :

Now, we can specify in a Label something like..

Email (to use Twitter enter youryoursername @twitter.com)

And then everything will match.

Hi,

Tried this above but the Twavatar plugin works easier.

Has this been setup on the smashingmag blog? I’ve just posted my comment here using my twitter email. fingers crossed

it didn’t work :(

Great idea – too bad it doesn’t work!

The email parameter has been deprecated: Test for yourself

It will only work if you can capture the user’s twitter username/id/screenname in addition to their email.

What if I have both Gravatar and Twitter?

(EDIT-> shows Gravatar)

Good ideas of Twitter.So if you are free,see follows

Ugg 5689 womens Stripes Classic Tall

Mid Cut Boot Wheat

Asics Men’s Onitsuka tiger Mexico 66

Women’s Pretty Tassel Pump Boot Purple

Air jordan 24 new mens

I think this is not working

Thanks!!!

If I understand you well, this plugin shows the Twitter image when you have both an Avatar and a Twitter icon. I figured you would use this yourself on this blog, why don’t you? At least it seems that you don’t use it here (no links, no mouseovers with info). EDIT>>> Avatar icon is used on this site instead of Twitter, but not sure its the same plugin here

Hint: there are also plugins that can take @yourname and auto-turn it into a Twitter.com/yourname link, as with @Kandura (my twitter name).

I like this plugin, thanks!

Great, I get it :)

i cant get this thing to work….i have to put it on my functions.php page instead…is this right?

plus when i did it, it didnt work :(