Develop auto post publishing twitter app

Posted by mahmud ahsan on November 30, 2009 in PHP, Twitter | 15 Comments

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Though according to CEO of Twitter he says “We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, it is an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.”  Though first people personally use twitter for their own purpose, but now twitter is very popular in business world. Many companies are using twitter to promote their business, inform people about their products, services.

In this article, I’ll show how you could develop a basic twitter application using php and twitter api, that will auto publish your predefined tweets. To develop this app we have to do the following tasks:

1. Create an offline authentication system
2. Develop an admin system to add posts in database
3. Write a php script that will publish the posts in twitter
4. Run the php script periodically using cron to auto publish the posts

Developing an offline authentication system: There is 2 ways, we can develop an offline authentication.

• User can give their username and password for offline access
• Using oAuth library user can only give permission to allow offline access

We can use the first solution, username and password. But keep in mind that, most of the users don’t like to give their username and password to a site/application. So we prefer to use oAuth library for twitter app.

OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows users to approve application to act on their behalf without sharing their password. To learn more about oAuth visit: http://oauth.net/

Check out the flow  chart to learn how oAuth works with Twitter

Lots of talking , now come to the point.

First visit http://twitter.com/oauth_clients and click Register a new App. Here you’ll see a page like this:

Now fill out this form. I assume that your web site link is: http://mysite.com . So we will create 4 files

1. http://mysite.com/config.php
2. http://mysite.com/twitter.php
3. http://mysite.com/twitter_authorization.php
4. http://mysite.com/twitter_cron.php

So in the form set Application Website ‘http://mysite.com/twitter.php’ .  Set Callback Url ‘http://mysite.com/twitter_authorization.php’.

Submit the form and you’ll get a Consumer key, Consumer secret. Save this keys for future reference.

Now download oAuth php library for our app’s purpose. Download oAuth Library . Unzip it and save twitterOAuth folder in your project root folder.

Create a config.php file and place it in the root folder of your project. Write below code in config.php

<?php
$consumer_key       = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'; //your app's consumer key
$consumer_secret   = 'yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'; //your app's secret key

include_once "model.php"; //model.php id described below
$model                  = new Model();

/* include the twitter OAuth library files */
require_once('twitterOAuth/twitterOAuth.php');
require_once('twitterOAuth/OAuth.php');

?>

Now write this code in twitter.php

<?php
    session_start();

    include_once "config.php";
    /*
    Create a new TwitterOAuth object, and then
    get a request token. The request token will be used
    to build the link the user will use to authorize the
    application.

     You should probably use a try/catch here to handle errors gracefully
    */

    $to = new TwitterOAuth($consumer_key, $consumer_secret);
    $tok = $to->getRequestToken();

    $request_link = $to->getAuthorizeURL($tok);

    $_SESSION['oauth_request_token']        = $tok['oauth_token'];
    $_SESSION['oauth_request_token_secret'] = $tok['oauth_token_secret'];

    header("Location: $request_link");
    exit;
?>

For database usage I use a model.php file for database connection and insert/update/delete and query purpose.

<?php
        /*
         * @author: Md. Mahmud Ahsan
         * @visit: http://thinkdiff.net
         * @description: database functionalities
         */
class Model{
    private $host   =   '';
    private $user   =   '';
    private $pass   =   '';
    private $db     =   '';

    function __construct($dbconfig){
        $this->host     =   'use your db host name'
        $this->user     =   'use your db user name';
        $this->pass     =   'use your db password';
        $this->db       =   'use your db name';
    }

    function connectDb(){
        $link = mysql_connect($this->host , $this->user , $this->pass );
        if (!$link){
            die (mysql_error());
        }
        mysql_select_db($this->db);

    }

    function closeDb(){
        mysql_close();
    }

    function query($sql){
        $this->connectDb();
        $data      =  array();
        $result    =  mysql_query($sql);

        if (!empty($result))
        $rows      =  mysql_num_rows($result);
        else
        $rows      =  '';

        if (!empty($rows)){
            while ($rows = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
                $data[]   = $rows;
            }
        }
        $this->closeDb();

        return $data;
    }

    function insert($sql){
        $this->connectDb();
        $result    =  mysql_query($sql);
        $this->closeDb();
        return $result;
    }

    function insertAndGetId($sql){
        $this->connectDb();
        $result    =  mysql_query($sql);
        $id        =  mysql_insert_id();
        $this->closeDb();
        return $id;
    }

    function update($sql){
        $this->connectDb();
        mysql_query($sql);
        $this->closeDb();
    }
    function delete($sql){
        $this->connectDb();
        mysql_query($sql);
        return mysql_affected_rows();
        $this->closeDb();
    }
}
?>

Create a database table, which table you’ll use for saving your apps configuration key for future purpose.

CREATE  TABLE `options` (
`appid` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`twitter_token` VARCHAR(200) NULL ,
`twitter_secret` VARCHAR(200) NULL ,
`created` DATETIME NULL ,
`updated` DATETIME NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`appid`) )
ENGINE = InnoDB

Now put below code in twitter_authorization.php.

<?php
session_start();

include_once "config.php";

if ((!isset($_SESSION['oauth_access_token'])) || ($_SESSION['oauth_access_token'])=='') {

 $to = new TwitterOAuth($consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $_SESSION['oauth_request_token'], $_SESSION['oauth_request_token_secret']);
 $tok = $to->getAccessToken();

 /* Save tokens for later  - might be wise to
 * store the oauth_token and secret in a database, and
 * only store the oauth_token in a cookie or session for security purposes */
 $_SESSION['oauth_access_token'] =           $token  =   $tok['oauth_token'];
 $_SESSION['oauth_access_token_secret'] =    $secret =   $tok['oauth_token_secret'];

}

$to     =   new TwitterOAuth($consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $_SESSION['oauth_access_token'], $_SESSION['oauth_access_token_secret']);

$token  =   $_SESSION['oauth_access_token'];
$secret =   $_SESSION['oauth_access_token_secret'];

//insert
$sql=   "INSERT into options (appid, twitter_token, twitter_secret, created, updated)
 values (1, '$token', '$secret', NOW(), NOW())";
$model->insert($sql);
?>

Now in your database the twitter app’s token and secret key is saved. we can use it for offline access. And we assigned ’1′ as our twitter app’s appid and saved it in database. You should develop a mechanism to dynamically generate and assign appid.

Now write the twitter_cron.php script that will auto publish your post.

<?php
include_once "config.php";

$sql        =   "SELECT * FROM options WHERE appid=1";
/*1 is your app you can dynamically map it for more than one application */
$result     =   $model->query($sql);

$token      =   $result[0]['twitter_token'];
$secret     =   $result[0]['twitter_secret'];
$status     =   "testing status";
/* you should make an admin from where you'll add status in database and retrieve those statuses and publish periodically */

//oAuth obj
try {
    $to = new TwitterOAuth($consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $token, $secret);

    $params     =   array('status' => $status);
    $do_dm      =   simplexml_load_string($to->OAuthRequest('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml', $params, 'POST'));
}
catch(Exception $o ){
    print_r($o);
}
?>

So this is the basic code. You have to set twitter_cron.php script as cron, so that it runs periodically. And please remember you’ve to make an admin from where you’ll add post in database, and you should update this twitter_cron.php code so that it should retrive a post automatically, publish it and make that published post in your database as status posted. Then same post will not publish again and again. I left the admin panel for your own purpose and I think it is very easy to develop an admin panel. Hope this tutorial will help you.

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