TwitterTweets: My First Plugin For the ColdFusion-Powered Mura CMS

This is my first attempt at building a Mura CMS plugin, so as you can imagine, this is going to be pretty darn simple. This plugin was actually inspired by a blog post I wrote back in March 2009 about using ColdFusion's CFFeed to display twitter tweets. If you like it ... great! If not, sorry I disappointed you.

The plugin will allow you to display the most recent tweets on your site(s). No knowledge of ColdFusion or programming should be required! However, if you are comfortable with .css, etc.then you'll be happy to know the tweets are displayed within a div id of "twitterTweets" and the tweets themselves are output in an unordered list, so you can style to your heart's content.

If there are tweets available via the twitter search interface, then you should be able to see output. If not, or if the tweets are more than a few weeks old, then you will see a message stating that there are no tweets available.

Installation

1. Login to your Mura CMS admin
2. Go to "Site Settings" (upper-right on the yellow bar)
3. Select the "Plugins" tab
4. Browse to the location of the TwitterTweets.zip file (don't unzip the files! Mura will do this for you. Unless, of course, you want to poke around the code.)
5. Click "Deploy"
6. You need to enter you twitter username. For example, if you visit http://twitter.com/stevewithington, then "stevewithington" is your username.
7. Under "Site Assignment" be sure you select which site(s) you wish to apply this plugin to
8. Go to the "Site Manager" of the site you wish to display this on
9. Select a page to edit
10. Select the "Content Objects" tab
11. From the "Available Content Objects" dropdown, select "Plugins"
12. Then select "TwitterTweets" and choose which area to display on by clicking the ">>" button
13. Click "Publish"

Optional settings at this point are merely how many recent tweets to display and whether or not you want to show a title above the tweets.

Need help?

Catch me on the Mura CMS forums or contact me through my site.

Cheers!

Edit

I was asked about using more than one twitter username and how to handle the plugin for multiple sites. The answer is actually quite simple. All you would have to do is install and deploy TwitterTweets again. This would allow you to have multiple installs, each with their own username, etc. This also gives you control over which install goes to which site(s).

I am considering including the ability to have multiple usernames for one install though.

Any other suggestions?