Solspace on Importing Tweets in ExpressionEngine

If you’ve tried to use the Twitter API to display tweets on a website, you probably have come across a situation where tweets just didn’t display, especially if the Twitter account wasn’t regularly updated.

Solspace ran into this same problem:

Pretty quickly we learned that depending on Twitter’s search API creates a fragile system. The API limits requests per IP. If you are on a shared server then you may be sharing this limit. Additionally, Twitter’s API changes occasionally. These issues can potentially leave an empty spot on our site or even a page that won’t load. I’ve seen a situation on a client site where the client was displaying their own tweets, but they tweeted infrequently and the search API wouldn’t pull their older content, sometimes leaving the space on their site devoted to tweets empty.

and created a workaround by importing the tweets into the EE database. To follow along their tutorial you’ll need the Twitter Timeline plugin (free from EllisLab) and the Solspace Importer ($79).

The process is simple enough: create an XML feed using Twitter Timeline and then pull that in using the Importer module. You can also use DataGrab, if you prefer that add-on.

Read their tutorial: Importing Tweets Into ExpressionEngine for Reliability and Control