Darren Ferguon - Weblog

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Auto Twitter update package for Umbraco

Filed under: Umbraco - by Darren Ferguson @ 8:18 PM

I have created an Umbraco package that updates your Twitter status when you publish certain types of document. You can download it here. I never thought I’d get into twitter but a number of friends and techies use it to micro blog what they are interested in or indeed what they are blogging.

The package is an Umbraco action handler. After install the configuration can be found in /umbraco/plugins/FergusonMoriyama/AutoTweet/twitter.config and is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
	<authentication>
		<username>you@gmail.com</username>
		<password>secret</password>
	</authentication>
	<doctypes>
		<doctype>
			<alias>umbracoBlogPost</alias>
			<titlePropertyAlias>Title</titlePropertyAlias>
			<message>has blogged '{title}'</message>
		</doctype>
	</doctypes>
</config>

I hope this is pretty self explanatory. You can add as many document types as you wish. The message element is the content of the tweet plus the link to the document appended, the token {title} is replaced with the title which is extracted from the document.

Now for the test. When I hit publish on this blog post my twitter status should be updated. Obviously it’ll be quite embarrassing if it doesn’t work.

This is a very beta/hacked together package based on an idea I had this morning. As ever comments, thoughts and suggestions are welcome.