Announcing IPB twitterer 2.0

[[R] NuclearGeneral]

IPB twitterer 2.0

Drive quality traffic to your websiteIPBPlug.in

A company specialized in developing applications, addons and plugins for Invision Power Board through the utilization of our extensive knowledge of the IPB framework. We adhere to IPS standards of coding and produce native-grade products. The company also works on customized applications requested by our clients.

 

What is IPB twitterer?

IPB twitterer is an innovative application that integrate Twitter services into Invision Power Board and its official applications.

It publishes contents from IP.Board to Twitter, and drives quality traffic and registrations to your forum. It's undeniable that people who click links in your tweets are surely interested in what you say.

With IPB twitterer, you can control what forums are going to publish their topics to Twitter automatically, and it does virtually real-time publishing.

IPB twitterer saves your resources, so instead of depending on third-party services that keep pulling your RSS feed, to determine whether there is new content to be published or not, IPB twitterer is a tool that operates as an application within your IP.Board under your full control, and it's faster than the other remote services.

IPB twitterer makes it easy for your members to interact with your tweets under topics, it also enables you to use unified short URL that can be tracked in bit.ly.

 

Features from Old Versions

• From forums you choose, it posts topics to Twitter immediately after they are posted on the forums.
  
• You can either show the topic title alone in the tweet, or add an excerpt from the topic content to it.
  
• All tweeted topics have the tweet under their posts, so your members can interact with them.
  
• Optionally, you can define a prefix and a suffix to be added to the tweets. This is usually used to add hashtags to your tweets.
  
• It shows a link to your official Twitter account in the primary navigation bar.
  

• Excellent integration with bitly.com to shorten links before posting them to Twitter. Also, you can take advantage of the Custom Short Domain feature of bitly, to brand your own short links. For example, we use iplg.in to shorten links from ipbplug.in.
  

Whats new in IPB twitterer 2.0?

• Rewritten from the ground up to introduce better integration between IPS products and Twitter.
  
• In addition to its ability to post updates from IP.Board to Twitter, IPB twitterer is integrated now with IP.Blog, IP.Downloads, IP.Gallery and IP.Content.
  
• Integrating Twitter Cards: IPB supports Twitter Cards now for IP.Board, IP.Blog, IP.Downloads, IP.Gallery and IP.Content.
  
• Ability to embed Vine Videos everywhere using the new [ vine ] bbcode tag.
  
• Ability to embed tweets everywhere using the new [ tweet ] bbcode tag.
  
• Change the old TweetBox to include an embedded tweet under the content, where readers can reply to, favourite or retweet the tweet.
  

Posting New Content to Twitter

IPB twitterer is capable now of tweeting on your behalf whenever content is posted at your website. This works for the applications as the following:

• IP.Board: You can define in AdminCP the forums from which topics will be posted to Twitter.
  
• IP.Blog: Whenever a new blog post is added to a public blog, it will be posted to Twitter.
  
• IP.Content: IPB twitterer is integrated as a block, so you need to add a block to your article template, you can use {parse block="ipb_twitterer"}. Published content will be posted to Twitter.
  
• IP.Downloads: Open files will be posted to Twitter.
  
• IP.Gallery: New & public galleries will be posted to Twitter.
  

Content will be posted to Twitter when they are visited by their creator within an hour of the time of publishing. This time limit is important to prevent posting old content to Twitter when they are visited by their creators.

 

 

The above image shows an album posted on Twitter, and the tweets is showed as an embedded tweet in the right column, where users can favourite, retweet or reply to it.

 

Twitter Cards

 

Twitter Cards help you richly represent your content within Tweets across the web and on mobile devices. This gives users greater context and insight into the URLs shared on Twitter, which in turn allows Twitter to send more engaged traffic to your site or app.

 

 

Twitter Cards:

• Give you control of how your content is displayed with Tweets.
  
• Drive traffic to your site.
  
• Increase the number of people following your Twitter accounts through content attribution.
  

IPB twitterer utilizes this functionality and enables your content to be represented in such an insightful way, that will bring more interested users to your website for sure. There are several types of Twitter Cards, from which the Summary Card makes sense to represent content of all IPS products except IP.Gallery which uses Gallery Card.

• IP.Board: Uses Summary Card. Shows in topics.
  
• IP.Blog: Uses Summary Card. Shows in Blog posts.
  
• IP.Content: Uses Summary Card. Shows in Articles and other database records.
  
• IP.Downloads: Uses Summary Card. Shows in files.
  
• IP.Gallery: Uses Gallery Card. Shows in Galleries.
  

You can check a live example from IPBPlug.in Twitter Account:

https://twitter.com/IPBplugin/statuses/416707516866002944

 

Twitter Cards dont work immediately, because Twitter requires validation and approval before it shows your Twitter Cards. I have gone through the process and its very easy.

• Upgrade to or install IPB twitterer 2.0.
  
• Prepare one link of your topics or articles, as Twitter requires one URL to test and validate.
  
• Go to the validator page: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator and choose the Summary from the catalog. If you have IP.Gallery, you need to repeat the whole process and apply once more for approval to enable Gallery Twitter Cards for your website.
  
• Click the Validate & Apply tab.
  
• Paste the link you have prepared in the validation textbox and click Go!.
  
• Twitter will fetch your page and if its valid, it will show you how your Twitter Card looks like.
  
• Finally, you can click the button to apply to twitter.
  
• You will see the following form, you have to fill it and click Request Approval.
  

• Twitter says it will take long before they get back to you, but in my test it took only few seconds to receive the following email.
  

Embedding Vine Videos

 

Vine is a mobile app owned by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips. The service was introduced with a maximum clip length of six seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.

IPB twitterer makes it easy to embed Vine videos in your website by introducing a new bbcode [ vine ], and it can be used like this:[vine]https://vine.co/v/hEUKzwzHUbr[/vine]and it looks like this:

 

 

 

Embed Tweets

Embedded Tweets make it possible for you take any Tweet and embed it directly in to the content of your article or website. Tweets display with expanded media like photos, videos, and article summaries, and also include real-time retweet and favourite counts. When embedded, Tweets are interactive and enable your readers to follow the Tweet author, and reply, retweet, favourite all directly from the page.

IPB twitterer makes it easy to embed tweets in your website by introducing a new bbcode [ tweet ], and it can be used like this:

[tweet]https://twitter.com/BarackObama/statuses/266031293945503744[/tweet]then it looks like this:

 

 

 

Embedded tweets are cached, so there is no need to query them every time from Twitter, and they appear inline without using iframes, thats good enrichment for your content (SEO-wise).

 

The Editor

Like most official bbcodes, both previous bbcodes add buttons to the editor:

 

 

Upgrading to IPB twitterer 2.0

If you have IPB twitterer 1.2.2 already installed, then you can upgrade easily like you do for any other application (Upload all files through FTP, then run the upgrading script). There is no need for re-authorization.

 

Configuring IPB twitterer 2.0

At this stage, we assume that you have already installed the application like you do with any other application. Configuring this app requires two main steps. Since it interacts with Twitter, it requires us to create whats called an Application in Twitter terminology. Then we have to authorize this application to post to Twitter on our behalf.

 

Creating Twitter Application

• Sign in with your Twitter credentials to https://dev.twitter.com
  
• Access your list of applications https://dev.twitter.com/apps
  
• Click Create a new application button.
  
• You wonder how you should fill the form. Go to AdminCP → Other Apps → IPB twitterer. You will see a page of the recommended values for your setup. Just copy and paste them to the form, then agree to the Developer Rules Of The Road.
  

• After you save. Go to the Settings tab of the Twitter application youve just created and edit the settings. You can get the recommended settings from the previous page as well. We emphasize the importance of the Access setting, set it to Read and Write because the default one is Read only which is not sufficient for our task here. Then click Update this Twitter application's settings.
  

Authorizing Twitter Application

 

From the Details tab of your Twitter application, copy two important settings we will need at this stage: "Consumer key" and "Consumer secret".

 

 

 

Go to Admin CP → System Settings → IPBPlug.in → IPB twitterer Options and paste the values in the appropariate fields, then save.

 

 

 

Now that you have saved the consumer key and consumer secret, you can start the authorization process.

Please go to your community, at the Admin Bar, you will see a new red link called Authorize IPB twitterer.

 

 

 

Click this link, and you will be directed to Twitter.com and asked to authorizae the application youve created at Twitter a couple of minutes ago to post on your behalf.

 

 

 

After you authorize the application, you will be directed back to your forums, and IPB twitterer will try to post a test tweet to confirm that it got the right authorization, otherwise it will show an error message explaining what has gone wrong.

 

 

 

Now go to settings and make sure you set everything to customize how IPB twitterer works.

 

Configure IP.Content (Recommended if you have IP.Content installed)

 

Due to the way IP.Content templates work, we couldnt insert the HTML using a Template Hook, thats why we decided to use a Block to address this problem. The only downside, is that it needs to be done manually for each database for which you want to enable this, but its fairly easy. Lets do it on the default Article View template:

• Go to Admin Cp → Other Apps → Content → Templates → Article Templates.
  
• Then open Article View.
  
• Find:
  
  
• Add before: {parse block="ipb_twitterer"}
  
• And you are good to go.
  

If you have customized Article View template, you may take advantage of the Professional Installation Service (mentioned below), and we will take care of it for you.

 

Configuring Bit.ly (Optional & Recommended)

You can configure bit.ly so IPB twitterer can make use of its service and shorten all links before posting them to Twitter. You need to visit the Bitly API Key Page

 

 

 

Copy the values from the API Key Page to the related fields in the settings:

 

 

 

For Custom Short Domain feature, please refer to the related documentation at bitly.com as we cannot offer support on how to enable it. Once you enable it at bitly.com, it will work automatically on your website, giving that you configured the settings appropriately.

 

Professional Installation Service (US $8)

 

If you want us to install this application for you, you can use our professional installation service. We install the application within up to 48 hours (we will make our best to install this as soon as possible. Im saying 48 hours, just in case) after you make a payment of US $8 to our PayPal account and provide (FTP access, Twitter credentials, Bit.ly API Key and AdminCP access at your forums). Also We can perform the installation process using TeamViewer if you want. Please contact me personally to arrange this:

 

Minimum Supported Versions

• IP.Board v3.4.6
  
• IP.Blog v2.6.3
  
• IP.Downloads v2.5.4
  
• IP.Content v2.3.6
  
• IP.Gallery v5.0.5
  

Pricing

 

We are reinstating the old price of US $20 for new licenses, we believe that the product deserves more than ever to be priced at US $20 or more. Renewal price has not changed, and its kept at US $9 for 6-months term.

 

The Future of IPB twitterer

 

Through its history, IPB twitterer sold more than 100 licenses at IPS Marketplace and IPBPlug.in, and we expect another 100 new license to be sold following the release of this upgrade. As a client, your engagement is very important to improve this product. You can follow us on Twitter @IPBplugin or Linkedin, drop us an email at: ipbplugin@ipbplug.in or feel free to post at our forums: https://ipbplug.in/

 

Dont forget to check our other products, including Two-step Authentication for IPB.

 

View the full article at IPS