John Kolbert

Show Your Latest Tweet In 5 Lines of Code

Written on June 30, 2009. Posted in: WordPress

This tutorial shows you how to add your latest Tweet to your WordPress website. It's fast and easy, and lets you broadcast your Twitter activity to your readers.

While working on the redesign of my website I realized I was using a very inefficient method of displaying my latest Twitter post (“Tweet”). Currently I’m using a script I found online that uses two functions that are just over 20 lines of code total. Here I’ll show you how to use WordPress’ built in RSS parser to display your latest tweet in 5 lines of code (thus this will only work on WordPress).

Note: An important aside about this script is that by default WordPress caches the feed for 1 hour. This means your Tweet on your website will be updated at that frequency. This is great because it saves your server a lot of overhead, especially on busy website. However, if you’re an avid Twitterer and want your very latest Tweet shown for every page refresh for every visitor, I recommend using this method.


function wp_echoTwitter($username){
     include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');
     $tweet = fetch_rss("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1");
     echo $tweet->items[0]['atom_content'];
}

Past the above in your functions.php file. Now just paste the following in your theme file where you want your Twitter post to appear:


<?php wp_echoTwitter('johnkolbert'); ?>

Obviously replace my username with yours. Now you’re done! Style it however you like with HTML and CSS.

Update:

If you’d like to show more then one tweet, here is an updated version of this function: http://jhnk.pastebin.com/5A4aXYTW

Cespur

July 17, 20091:22 pm

Nice one! I will probally be using this, thanks.

Green

August 3, 20099:03 pm

Very helpful. looking at options currently.

human3rror

August 11, 20093:06 pm

awesome.

webmack

August 15, 20095:54 pm

it works the first time, btu when the cache time expires, the tweet stops showing. any way to fix this? I’m hosted on a windows server running IIS.

Andrea

September 10, 200910:56 pm

cool, thanks… twitter's really hot right now, should get in the bus before it leaves!

shuks

October 4, 20096:52 pm

Thank you for this. very helpful indeed. quick question. Any way to refresh the tweet less than 1 hour? Thanks again.

Jo6891

October 5, 20094:06 pm

Fantastic! V. helpful, Thankyou!

inventory programs

October 16, 20099:06 am

hmm.. good for you! ever since you are really great!

Patience

October 30, 20096:53 am

Thank you so much..I've spent hours to try and get this to work!…now to find some CSS help.

fast software

November 5, 20091:55 pm

Thanx for the useful info this blog is very educative.

@mandrill

November 12, 20091:43 pm

Is there a way to add reply, retweet, follow and DM buttons/links to this in a similarly easy and user friendly fashion? Cos that would be great

Presentations Expert

November 20, 20095:59 pm

Nice sharing. Searching for this codes for long.

Marko

November 25, 20096:12 am

small and very preaty peace of code
Thank you

Richard

January 10, 20107:07 am

Awesome!!
Thanks

car

January 14, 20105:23 pm

Excellent, been looking for this for a while, thanks!

Naturalpills

January 18, 20103:37 pm

Coding, very good lines!!

Oil Heater

February 8, 201012:20 pm

Great piece of code, thanks for sharing it!

faydaliweb

February 23, 201010:01 am

Thanks for the codes.But ı think this can be done with plugin who dont wants to edit the templates

John Kolbert

March 18, 201010:33 pm

Yes, but I’m a developer. I like to do things myself rather then rely on plugins.

SJL Website Design

March 16, 20106:02 pm

Thanks for the great piece of code John, very simple solution compared to the javascript alternatives.

Fire Curtains

April 28, 20104:11 pm

Cheers for this, im gonna go put our twitter feed on our blog now!

Chris

April 30, 20105:57 am

Sweet! Thanks so much. This worked great for me. I needed something that would show the latest tweet per user, based on a custom field. Your 5 lines of code saved me hours of trying to find a plugin that could easily be changed to fit our needs. Copy, paste & 30 seconds of editing to throw in some variables & now we have complete functionality.

Thanks again!!