Question

Found out today that Twitter will be discontinuing its basic authentication for its API; the push is now towards OAuth but I don’t have a clue as to how to use it or whether it’s the right path for me.

All I want to be able to do is post a tweet linking to the most recently published post when I hit publish. Currently I’m sending the login credentials for my Twitter account as plaintext, which I realise isn’t that secure but as my site is fairly small it isn’t an issue at least for now.

I’m using this basic PHP code:

$status = urlencode(stripslashes(urldecode("Test tweet")));
$tweetUrl = 'http://www.twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "$tweetUrl");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$status");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");

$result = curl_exec($curl);
$resultArray = curl_getinfo($curl);

if ($resultArray['http_code'] == 200)
{
    curl_close($curl);
    $this->redirect("");
}
else
{
    curl_close($curl);
    echo 'Could not post to Twitter. Please go back and try again.';
}

How do I move from this to an OAuth system? I’d greatly appreciate any tutorials/advice. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I found this page/script useful when I implemented OAuth for Twitter: http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2009/04/30/letting-your-users-sign-in-with-twitter-with-oauth/
I’m sure you can get this from the page I linked to, but the code I use with this class for my page is

$twtrObj=new EpiTwitter($consumer_key, $consumer_secret);
$twtrObj->setToken($tok, $sec);
$status="I just submited new artwork! http://gravityprops.com/dragonart/artwork?action=view&id={$id}";
$update=$twtrObj->post_statusesUpdate(array('status' => $status));
$tmp=$update->response;

with $tok and $sec being the token and secret for any specific user which I pull from the database. The $consumer_key and $consumer_secret are declared in a separate file which are included (in the same fashion as on the page I linked to). I put all the files I need in my PHP include folder so that only PHP can access it.