Padraic Brady has posted a new tutorial to his blog about making a Twitter client using the Zend Framework's Zend_OAuth component for user validation.

During yesterday, I finally got around to patching and finishing Zend_Oauth's Consumer implementation for the OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A specification. Once I had it finished, I used it to write a quick and simple interface to post some Tweets on Twitter while I was testing it out. [...] In this article I'll explore how to writea quick Twitter client so you can post tweets (those short messages of less than 140 characters) once authorised across the OAuth protocol.

He starts of by explaining what OAuth is and how it can help provide a better level of authentication than just the usual username/password combo. His example code shows how to connect your OAuth provider's settings with the Zend_OAuth object and pass the request token over for authentication. You'll have to approve the mini-application to allow access to your Twitter account, but once you do, it should be smooth sailing.