Almost every web design / development blog, and the majority of other blogs, like to display the number of people they have following their Twitter account. Their are a variety of ways to do this, and dozens of plugins that do it for you, but as a developer it is a really good if you know how to do it without relying on a plugin.
Peter Ivanov wrote a great PHP function that does exactly what we need. Simply paste this into your functions.php:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 | /** * Fetch the number of followers from twitter api * * @author Peter Ivanov * @copyright http://www.ooyes.net * @version 0.2 * @link http://www.ooyes.net * @param string $username * @return string */ function twitter_followers_counter($username) { $cache_file = CACHEDIR . 'twitter_followers_counter_' . md5 ( $username ); if (is_file ( $cache_file ) == false) { $cache_file_time = strtotime ( '1984-01-11 07:15' ); } else { $cache_file_time = filemtime ( $cache_file ); } $now = strtotime ( date ( 'Y-m-d H:i:s' ) ); $api_call = $cache_file_time; $difference = $now - $api_call; $api_time_seconds = 1800; if ($difference >= $api_time_seconds) { $api_page = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/' . $username; $xml = file_get_contents ( $api_page ); $profile = new SimpleXMLElement ( $xml ); $count = $profile->followers_count; if (is_file ( $cache_file ) == true) { unlink ( $cache_file ); } touch ( $cache_file ); file_put_contents ( $cache_file, strval ( $count ) ); return strval ( $count ); } else { $count = file_get_contents ( $cache_file ); return strval ( $count ); } } |
This function will contact the Twitter API and obtain the follower count for the specified username, and store the results in a cache so that the count isn’t recalculated with every page load, resulting in dozens, or hundreds, of API request calls.
To display the actual follower count, simple do this anywhere in your template files:
1 | print twitter_followers_counter($twitter_name); |
Remember to replace $twitter_name with your Twitter username. To display this site’s follower count, we’d do:
1 | print twitter_followers_counter('wpmods'); |
Enjoy!
Pippin
Works fine for me (if you fix the & gt encoding) - perhaps you should change this example dude :)
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