New Plugin: EE Twitter Search

Dave Rencher of Lumis.com has released a very cool new plugin called EE Twitter Search. Unlike other Twitter-related add-ons, EE Twitter Search allows you specify what type of tweets show up in your template. For example, you can pass a query for “expressionengine” and the plugin will return recent tweets that mention “expressionengine.” You can also only display tweets from a specific user, by hash tag (e.g. #sxsw), tweets that are to a user (@somebody) or that reference a user.

And, yes, it supports caching, too. Here’s the code I tested to display the latest tweets that mention “expressionengine:”

{exp:twitter_search:find q="expressionengine" convert_url="yes"}
{from_user}: {text}
{/exp:twitter_search:find}

The convert_url parameter converts all URLs in tweets to linked URLs when given the value of “yes.” Very handy.

I tested this plugin and it works as described, however, I did run into one problem where the refresh parameter would cause the tweets to not show up. I’ve not yet found a workaround, but plan to report it to the developer.