Tag Archives: transient

Twitter Followers Count Snippet for WordPress

Konstantin Kovshenin posted some code on his blog for how to display how many Twitter followers someone has. While the idea was good, I think he went about the implementation in the non-best method. So, for fun and because I don’t post enough code snippets here on this blog, I thought I’d post how I would display how many followers someone has on Twitter. :) 

function viper_twitter_followers( $username = 'Viper007Bond' ) {

	// Just to keep the code below cleaner, create the cache key now
	$cache_key = "viper_twitter_followers_{$username}";

	// First we look for a cached result
	if ( false !== $followers = get_transient( $cache_key ) )
		return $followers;

	// Okay, no cache, so let's fetch it
	$result = wp_remote_retrieve_body( wp_remote_get( 'http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=' . urlencode($username) ) );

	// Check to make sure we got some data to work with
	if ( empty($result) ) {
		// Cache the failure for 1 min to avoid hammering Twitter
		set_transient( $cache_key, 0, 60 );
	}

	// Parse the data
	$data = json_decode( $result );

	// Make sure we were able to parse it
	// If not, cache the failure (like above)
	if ( !isset( $data->followers_count ) )
		set_transient( $cache_key , 0, 60 );

	// Success! Cache the result for an hour.
	$followers = (int) $data->followers_count;
	set_transient( $cache_key, $followers, 3600 );

	return $followers;
}

echo 'I have ' . viper_twitter_followers( 'Viper007Bond' ) . ' followers on Twitter!';

Reading Material:

If you have any questions about the above code, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them. :)