NetTuts.com has posted the second part of their series about creating a Twitter client on top of the Yii framework. In this new tutorial they focus on "tweet storms", the use of a series of tweets to share a thought rather than just cramming it into one.

In April, investor and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen began expanding on the natural 140 character limits of Twitter by publishing his thoughts in sequences of tweets, which some have dubbed tweet storms. [...] A few services arose to make it easier for mere mortals like ourselves to publish tweet storms but they seemed a bit unreliable and inconsistent. I decided to build the feature myself and I think there's value in doing this with your own app.

He outlines the features that the "tweet storm" feature needs to support and the database models/migrations that you'll need to store the related data. He uses Yii's generators to create the needed skeleton classes for the models and controllers. He moves on to the code needed to handle the group tweets management and to compose the tweets that will make up the "storm". Finally, he includes the code you'll need to create the publishing feature, pushing it into both the models/database and out to the Twitter API. You can then use the "OEmbed" information provided by Twitter to view the series of tweets via another simple page (code included here too).

Responding to the recent comments about the filter extension included in recent PHP 5 releases from other members of the community, Pádraic Brady has posted comments on the matter including his experience with the extension and his worry about the other comments tarnishing the extension's reputation.

Personally I haven't tested ext/filter. I should no doubt be shot like a rabid dog for daring to post about this for that reason alone. Commenting idly without any knowledge of an extension is obviously illegal somewhere, possibly China.

He notes that some of the comments (the more inflammatory ones) were a bit out of place, and that feedback about issues has its place - not in major public view. He worries that the negative comments will cast a negative shadow on the extension and that the "back and forth" that's a result of it only serves to cause more trouble than it's worth.

Responding to the recent comments about the filter extension included in recent PHP 5 releases from other members of the community, Pádraic Brady has posted comments on the matter including his experience with the extension and his worry about the other comments tarnishing the extension's reputation.

Personally I haven't tested ext/filter. I should no doubt be shot like a rabid dog for daring to post about this for that reason alone. Commenting idly without any knowledge of an extension is obviously illegal somewhere, possibly China.

He notes that some of the comments (the more inflammatory ones) were a bit out of place, and that feedback about issues has its place - not in major public view. He worries that the negative comments will cast a negative shadow on the extension and that the "back and forth" that's a result of it only serves to cause more trouble than it's worth.