Question

All,
I have the following code to retrieve some Tweets:

if( ! $tweet ) {
    $url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name={$username}&count={$how_many}";
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
    $contents = curl_exec( $curl );
    curl_close( $curl );
    if ( ! empty( $contents ) ) {
        // Decode it.
        $tweet = json_decode( $contents );
        }
    }

    // Check to make sure we have a tweet and display it.
    if ( $tweet ) {
        do_action( 'themeblvd_twitter_slider', $tweet, $options, $username, $slider_id );
    } else {
        $output = 'Twitter timed out.';
    }
    return $output;

I then have the following code to put them in a Slider:

function themeblvd_twitter_slider_default( $tweet, $options, $username, $slider_id ) {
$tweet = (array)$tweet;
$classes = themeblvd_get_classes( 'slider_standard', true );
$classes .= ' hide-nav_standard';
$classes .= ' show-nav_arrows';
$classes .= ' show-pause_play';

//themeblvd_twitter_slider_js( $slider_id, $options );
?>
<div id="tb-slider-<?php echo $slider_id; ?>" class="slider-wrapper standard-slider-wrapper">
    <div class="slider-inner<?php echo $classes; ?>">   
        <div class="slides-wrapper slides-wrapper-<?php echo $slider_id; ?>">
            <div class="slides-inner">
                <div class="slider standard-slider flexslider">
                    <div class="tb-loader"></div>
                    <ul class="slides">
                                <?php
                                foreach($tweet as $t){
                                ?>
                                <li class="slide tight <?php echo $classes; ?>">
                                    <div class="slide-body">
                                        <div class="grid-protection">
                                        <?php
                                        echo '<span class="tweet-icon '.$options['icon'].'"></span>';
                                        echo '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.$username.'/status/'.$t->id_str.'" target="_blank">';
                                        echo $t->text;
                                        echo '</a>';
                                        ?>

                                        </div><!-- .grid-protection (end) -->
                                    </div><!-- .slide-body (end) -->
                                </li>
                                <?php
                                }
                                ?>
                    </ul>
                </div><!-- .slider (end) -->
            </div><!-- .slides-inner (end) -->                  
        </div><!-- .slides-wrapper (end) -->
    </div><!-- .slider-inner (end) -->
    <div class="design-1"></div>
    <div class="design-2"></div>
    <div class="design-3"></div>
    <div class="design-4"></div>                    
</div><!-- .slider-wrapper (end) -->
<?php
}
?>

This code works about 90% of the time and grabs the tweets based on a username etc. However, about 10% of the time it just rotates without displaying any of the texts. Does anyone see anything or a way that I can make this solution better so that the tweets are always displayed? Is there anything from an error handling perspective that I’m missing that I could add to not display it if it can’t retrieve the tweets?

Thanks for any advice in advance.

Answer 1

You could try to check if what twitter returns actually is a list of tweets. At the moment you only check if twitter returns anything at all.

// Check to make sure we have a tweet and display it.
if ( is_array($tweet) && isset($tweet[0]->id_str) ) {
    do_action( 'themeblvd_twitter_slider', $tweet, $options, $username, $slider_id );
} else {
    $output = 'Twitter timed out.';
}