Symphony.

Hi guys,

So Twitter have decided that they'd like to make pulling in their feeds as difficult as humanly possible and I've run into an issue (surprise).

So first of all API v1 seems to be going down, so no more XML support. A production site we work on lost its feeds a couple of weeks back and a dev one (where we use Symphony) lost its feed today.

So I've installed the 'Remote Datasource' extension which supports json - however the issue is that Twitter is now demanding oAuth on all calls. How can this be accomplished in Symphony?

If I try to create a standard datasource it doesn't work, because the request URL just returns an error, as it's not authenticated - but naturally the only option I have in a datasource is to stick in a URL.

Has anyone else come up across this problem and solved it?

Yes, I have built a custom extension that uses oAuth to fetch tweets from several Twitter accounts, which unfortunately I can not release (for several reasons), at least not at the moment.

The problem is not limited to the technical aspect. Starting in March, the Twitter Display Guidelines will become requirements. If you don't obey these (strict) rules, they will shut down your API access. (See: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api)

If Twitter does not revert this decision, I will drop any Twitter support anyway. And my advice is to not put any work in using the Twitter API currently, because I feel that I am not the only one. It might go fast with Twitter, "thumbs down", the developer community may drop them.

I'd love to just not bother - unfortunately though I'm in an industry where we need presence. It was a big enough move for me to drop my own Facebook profile!

So is that to say that in March we'll have to use API 1.1? As I managed to get around the problem by using JSON with v1 of the API which doesn't require oAuth - that seems to work at least and it was an easy fix.

I guess we'll just have to consider dropping the feed from our site. I can't see how that benefits Twitter but it's the only consequence I can imagine from their new policies - so I assume they must have a plan of some sort.

From the Twitter article:

If your application is currently using the Twitter API without using OAuth, you will need to update your application before March 2013.

So you have some time left. Maybe Twitter will revert the decisions. But they have done something very stupid (and they are talking in "marketing speak" blabla to us).

considering apps now have to adhere to their strict and stupid styling guidelines, could you not just use their timeline plugin?

@touchstone, I don't know about michael and the others, but I can't. I need twitter to integrate into my site much neater, and styling that thing is just a pain.

considering apps now have to adhere to their strict and stupid styling guidelines, could you not just use their timeline plugin?

That suggestion offends my delicate sensibilities.

While I think Twitter are absolutely shooting themselves in the foot with these sorts of changes, this is an opportunity for a developer to create a Twitter Datasource type!

I was just thinking that. Providers + Oauth extension ;)

Ok, I'll take this task upon me. I need this for my project (albeit very simple), and I can't always leech on you guys:)

Since my needs will be rather simple, I'd love to have input from you to see what should be supported, and what can be left out.

@creativedutchmen: If you like, I can explain what I have built (and why I haven't released it). It's an extension working with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr data. I think that the concept is quite interesting. Drop me an email if you'd like to talk about it.

on the same lines with @brendo and @designermonkey here... I have something on the way but its not 100% finished yet...

Awesome, you guys are the best.

@creativedutchmen For me at least cleanliness, rather than extendability is the key - i.e. I love how I can just dump a twitter API url into a data source and BAM, there's your twitter feed. Ideally I'd do exactly the same thing, plus provide my oAuth key and the extension would do the rest - i.e. I wouldn't be looking for any bells and whistles, just a way to provide an oAuth key along with the URL in the datasource (I also imagine that this is the simplest way to develop the extension?).

Unfortunately I need to continue leeching for a bit before I can start contributing extensions - I'm not actually a developer by trade (UX Designer) and still new to Symphony - so it'll be a little while yet until I have fully found my feet :)

Has there been any update on this issue? This seems to be one of the problems I run into the most when trying to implement tweets into my Symphony sites.

I would gladly help write up some documentation/tutorials for the solution once completed, given that I can fully understand the process/code. It's just a shame that we can't take advantage of twitter feeds with a vanilla install anymore.

I managed to pull in a twitter rss feed again after some googling... https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/usertimeline.rss?screenname=symphonycms

@Cremol I'm currently using this on one of my Symphony installs, but I'm afraid that it could be phased out at any moment due to it using the v1 API. I'm just looking ahead to come up with something a bit more future proof. @creativedutchmen mentioned a hardcoded data source solution on Twitter that I've asked him to share here.

Hopefully that can get us started!

I found out about this url a couple of days ago,
Thought rss support was given up ages ago.. cause it stopped working on some sites as well where i was using another url.
So this works for the time being, but a more future proof would be better indeed!

You know, I thought the same thing. Then, I literally saw this a few minutes ago on Reddit: https://dev.twitter.com/calendar

They are officially scheduled to kill/retire the v1 API today.

"June 11th, 2013 - Retirement of deprecated API v1.0. Retirement of Basic Auth support on Streaming API."

Looks like we may be in a bit of a scramble to get our twitter feeds working again. haha

To have them continue working you'd need to use the oAuth version. Not sure if there's something packaged completely. Unfortunately I don't have time to package one but I had something working a few months back...

This week I converted my Twitter DS to the new oAuth API. I haven't abstracted stuff enough to release it as an extension, but I wouldn't mind sharing the code with you if you like.