Twitter Widget being Retired

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3/13/2013 7:41:34 AM
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Twitter Widget being Retired

Joe - 

I saw a warning on one of our sites saying that Twitter is going to retire the widget that is used on mojoPortal.

Will you be making an update to this feature in the next release of mojoPortal to prepare for this change?

More info: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/planning-for-api-v1-retirement

 

​Thanks,

Danielle

3/13/2013 8:21:36 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

What version of mojoPortal are you using? As far as I know we moved to the version 2 api a good while back.

In any case one can always generate the latest widget from the url http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets and embed that in a standard Html content instance rather than using the Twitter "features" in mojoPortal.

Best,

Joe

3/13/2013 8:33:12 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Good to hear! We're currently running 2.3.9.4. and seeing the following warning on our sites using the profile widget:

"TWITTER WIDGET: This widget is being deprecated, and will cease functioning soon."

Our clients would be the one adding the twitter widget to their site, so in most cases they would add the twitter widget versus the HTML content instance. 

3/13/2013 9:31:08 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

I just tried adding the Twitter Profile Widget to the mojoPortal Demo site and saw the same warning appears there

https://demo.mojoportal.com/more 

3/13/2013 9:36:26 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Yes our last update of the twitter widget was 15 months ago so I guess we do need to look into updating it again.

However I'm not seeing this warning you mention, I've tried Chrome Firefox and IE, not sure why I'm not seeing it, I'll take your word for it that you see it though. If I had seen it before I would have already looked into it.

Thanks,

Joe

3/13/2013 9:42:21 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Not a problem, just wanted to make sure it was brought to your attention. I'm using Chrome and see the warning when I open the developer tools. 

Thanks!

-Danielle

3/13/2013 10:44:26 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Hmm,

In looking at the new widget code each widget requires a widget id generated by twitter which one can only get by generating the widget code at twitter. So the problem is going to be that I have no way to make it friendly for a non technical user. ie the downside of using the Html content feature is that the user must generate the widget code and paste it in the html source view. I could add a setting for the id in the feature settings of the twitter features but the user still has to be able to generate the widget, extract the id and paste it into the setting which is at least as un friendly as just pasting the whole widget into the Html content.

3/13/2013 11:37:46 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

I'm afraid that due to the changes twitter has put in place we will have to "retire" our twitter features just as they have retired their older api that they depend on because there is no longer a way that we can easily make it more user friendly than generating the widget and pasting it in. This is the same reason we never made a feature for Facebook profile widgets, because it requires generating the widget at facebook which includes a specific id that FB generates. If you have to generate the widget and copy part of it you might as well just copy all of it.

Twitter used to be an open platform but they no longer want any access to their api without tying it to a specific account so that they can limit the amount of access and prevent anyone from over-using it or managing to monetize use of it beyond their control. You can find a lot about this by googling "twitter is no longer an open api" but much of it is summed up in Don't Use That Open API It Could Be a Trap.

The bottom line is that it isn't that hard to generate their widget and paste it in but their dropping of the older api has burned us and makes me regret having ever implemented a "feature" for it in the first place. But people will have to forgive us for retiring our feature if they forgive Twitter from dropping their older more open api and if they don't forgive twitter they should still forgive us since it is beyond our control.

Best,

Joe

5/1/2013 11:33:46 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Is there anything special that you have to do to get the Twitter generated widget code to work in an HTML Content module? I pasted the code from the Twitter site into a Module but it wont render the widget (just the Title). When I paste that same code into a plain html page it works just fine. Tried adding a div etc but no luck. Any ideas?

5/1/2013 11:38:12 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

You may want to go into the settings of the Html content and disable the wysiwyg editor. Sometimes the editor may "cleanup" what you entered which you don't want when adding javascript.

Hope that helps,

Joe

5/1/2013 11:53:39 AM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Thanks Joe, that worked. Must be something added by the system that breaks the render when using the WYSIWYG.

5/1/2013 1:20:30 PM
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Re: Twitter Widget being Retired

Also, I found this for WordPress if you get the urge to try and create a new widget for this in the future:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/twitter-timeline-widget/

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