How to display your latest tweets on your WordPress blog without any plugin

How to display your latest tweets on your WordPress blog without any plugin

If you’re using Twitter, you maybe want to display your latest tweets on your blog. You can use a plugin for that, or you can use this code to display your tweets without using any plugin.

Simply paste the following code anywhere in your theme files, where you want the tweets to be displayed.
Don't forget to update the code with your username on line 3. Max items to display can be defined on line 4.

<?php
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php');
$rss = fetch_feed('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=catswhocode');
$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(3);
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '<li>No items.</li>';
else
// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
<li>
<a href='<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>'>
<?php echo $item->get_title(); ?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for this great code!

17 Responses

Dimitar Tsonev

Feb 08 2012 12:16

Fatal error: Call to undefined method WP_Error::get_item_quantity() in [FILE]

Mike Rogers

Feb 10 2012 18:56

The fetch_feed() function will by default cache the feed for 12 hours. You can change this to every hour by adding the following code to your function.php file:

Mike Rogers

Feb 10 2012 18:57

function filter_handler( $seconds )
{
// change the default feed cache recreation period to 2 hours
return 7200;
}

add_filter( ‘wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime’ , ‘filter_handler’ );

From: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime

Andrew

Feb 11 2012 19:46

Thanks for a useful and simple solution. I have one question. Number of tweets is defined here? $ rss-> get_item_quantity (3)

Henry

Feb 13 2012 00:51

I read on the Twitter development blog that “Twitter API only allows clients to make a limited number of calls in a given hour”. If my site gets quite a lot of hits per hour, does that mean the latest tweet won’t be displayed?

Geoffrey

Feb 14 2012 00:31

Hi,

Be carefull, the Twitter API has a limited number of call per hour. You can see it with the “Live HTTP headers” plugin of Firefox.
“X-RateLimit-Remaining: 147″
You can make 150 calls per hour from the same IP server.
This limit is exceeded quickly with a shared server.

You can also limit the number of tweets directly to the query :
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=catswhocode&count=3

Try with this URL :
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=from%3Acatswhocode&rpp=3

Or with this plugin that handles connection attempts on the two URLs :
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/juiz-last-tweet-widget/
(the cache system will be improved in the week thanks to the tip of @Mike Rogers)

Thanks.

Henry

Mar 01 2012 00:57

@Geoffrey,

Thanks for replying. I will give the plugin a shot.

Henry

Vic Dinovici

Apr 21 2012 05:09

Thanks Jean-Baptiste! Any idea how to add the Twitter feed on a regular html, non-Wordpress page?

Jean-Paul

May 10 2012 08:06

Hi, I’m a novice with WordPress, is there an advantage to not using a plugin, vs. using one? Seems like a plugin would be easier to uninstall at some future point, if needed.