gnu-social/plugins/TwitterBridge

Twitter Bridge Plugin
=====================

This Twitter "bridge" plugin allows you to integrate your StatusNet
instance with Twitter. Installing it will allow your users to:

- automatically post notices to their Twitter accounts
- automatically subscribe to other Twitter users who are also using
your StatusNet install, if possible (requires running a daemon)
- import their Twitter friends' tweets (requires running a daemon)
- allow users to authenticate using Twitter ('Sign in with Twitter')

Installation
------------

OAuth 1.0a (http://oauth.net) is used to to access protected resources
on Twitter. To use Twitter bridging you will need to register your
instance of StatusNet as an application on Twitter (http://twitter.com/apps).
During the application registration process your application will be assigned
a "consumer" key and secret, which the plugin will use to make OAuth requests
to Twitter. You can either pass the consumer key and secret in when you
enable the plugin, or set it using the Twitter administration panel.

When registering your application with Twitter set the type to "Browser"
and your Callback URL to:

http://example.org/mublog/twitter/authorization

(Change "example.org" to your site domain and "mublog" to your site
path.)

The default access type should be "Read & Write".

To enable the plugin, add the following to your config.php:

addPlugin(
'TwitterBridge',
array(
'consumer_key' => 'YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY',
'consumer_secret' => 'YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET'
)
);

or if you want to set the variables from the website's administration panel:

addPlugin('TwitterBridge');

After saving your configuration file, please run 'php scripts/upgrade.php'
and also restart the background daemons if they are active on your instance.

Administration panel
--------------------

To access the administration panel, you'll need to use a user with the
"administrator" role (see: scripts/userrole.php).

Sign in with Twitter
--------------------

GNU social optionally allows users to register and authenticate using their
Twitter credentials via the "Sign in with Twitter" pattern described here:

https://dev.twitter.com/web/sign-in

The option is _on_ by default when you install the plugin, but it can
disabled via the Twitter bridge administration panel, or by adding the
following line to your config.php:

$config['twitter']['signin'] = false;

Daemons
-------

For friend syncing and importing Twitter tweets, running two
additional daemon scripts is necessary: synctwitterfriends.php and
twitterstatusfetcher.php.

In the daemons subdirectory of the plugin are three scripts:

* Twitter Friends Syncing (daemons/synctwitterfriends.php)

Users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe to my Twitter friends
here" under the Twitter tab) to have StatusNet attempt to locate and
subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on Twitter who also have
accounts on your StatusNet system, and who have previously set up a link
for automatically posting notices to Twitter.

The plugin will start this daemon when you run scripts/startdaemons.sh.

* Importing statuses from Twitter (daemons/twitterstatusfetcher.php)

You can allow uses to enable importing of your friends' Twitter
timelines either in the Twitter bridge administration panel or in your
config.php using the following configuration line:

$config['twitterimport']['enabled'] = true;

The plugin will then start the TwitterStatusFetcher daemon along with the
other daemons when you run scripts/startdaemons.sh.

Additionally, you will want to set the integration source variable,
which will keep notices posted to Twitter via StatusNet from looping
back. You can do this in the Twitter bridge administration panel, or
via config.php. The integration source should be set to the name of your
application _exactly_ as you specified it on the settings page for your
StatusNet application on Twitter, e.g.:

$config['integration']['source'] = 'YourApp';

* TwitterQueueHandler (daemons/twitterqueuehandler.php)

This script sends queued notices to Twitter for user who have opted to
set up Twitter bridging.

It's not strictly necessary to run this queue handler, and sites that
haven't enabled queuing are still able to push notices to Twitter, but
for larger sites and sites that wish to improve performance the script
allows notices to be sent "offline" via a separate process.

StatusNet will automatically use the TwitterQueueHandler if you have
enabled the queuing subsystem. See the "Queues and daemons" section of
the main README file for more information about how to do that.