Question

When using the Twitter Timeline plugin in EE1, is there a way to filter out mentions from the list of tweets that it outputs?

I only want to output tweets that don’t start off as a reply to another user, in order to avoid conversations appearing in a website’s Twitter feed.

Thanks,

Ste

Answer 1

I’ve used Tweetline for this in the past. It’s quite a bit more flexible than the Twitter Timeline plugin and you can easily filter out mentions and retweets.

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Edit with EE1 fix: Fortunately the Twitter API (even this old version) supports parameters for retweets and replies, so adding in params for those is very simple. Look for this on line 82:

$TMPL->log_item("Using '{$timeline}' Twitter Timeline {$log_extra}");

Underneath that add the following:

// toggle retweets and replies

if ($TMPL->fetch_param('replies') == 'off')
{
    $this->parameters['exclude_replies'] = TRUE;
}

if ($TMPL->fetch_param('retweets') == 'on')
{
    $this->parameters['include_rts'] = TRUE;
}

You can then use code like this in your template:

{exp:twitter_timeline screen_name="someguy" limit="1" replies="off" retweets="off"}

Due to the way the API’s setup it looks as though replies are included by default and retweets aren’t. It’s worth noting this too, from the API docs:

The value of count is best thought of as a limit to the number of tweets to return because suspended or deleted content is removed after the count has been applied. We include retweets in the count, even if include_rts is not supplied. It is recommended you always send include_rts=1 when using this API method.