Raphael Stolt has a new post to his blog today looking at how you can use the Zend_Service_Twitter component of the Zend Framework to work with the lists on Twitter.

While debating some use cases for an event registration application I stumbled upon an interesting feature, which adds participants automatically to a Twitter list upon registration. [...] This post will show how this feature can be implemented by utilizing the Zend_Service_Twitter component, and how it then can be used in a Zend Framework based application.

The Zend_Service_Twitter component makes it simple to interact with Twitter's API and calling the lists part of the API is a snap. His script first checks to see if a list exists, creates it if it doesn't and will add a user to it when they're registering. The class also includes the usual delete and modify functionality for both the users in the list and the lists themselves.

He finishes with a simple form that uses his interface class to take in the person's twitter username and send it off to the service.

In a recent post to his blog Joey Rivera looks at using the Zend_paginator component with Twitter and APC to create a cachable, paged view of a set of Twitter API results.

I'm going to focus more on Zend_Paginator and Zend_Rest_Client to access Twitters API since I've already created a post on Zend_Cache. Normally, I would use Zend_Service_Twitter to access the twitter service but it still seems to require authentication to retrieve a users timeline where only protected users should require authentication.

He includes all of the needed code including the bootstrap.ini file and his own custom Twitter service class that grabs the timeline of the given user and calls the REST interface to grab the latest posts and caches them to a file.

In a recent blog post Konstantin take a look at some updates made to a Twitter OAuth library (TwitterOAuth) recently to make it even easier to use:

Just like everybody else, I never read the readme or other documentation files so I dug straight into the class code and examples. Soon after I realized that the new changes were not that bad, so instead of the usual 5 lines of code, I shortened it up to only one. I stopped worrying about parsing XML or JSON, converting them to objects, and I stopped typing in the full address for Twitter API calls. Abraham did all that for us.

It makes it simpler to use, but can break backwards compatibility, so watch out for that if you're using Abraham's library. If you're interested who's using the class, check out this page on his github wiki.

New on the Developer Tutorials site there's a tutorial from Padraic Brady showing how to create a simple Twitter client (to connect and send a tweet to the timeline) via an OAuth (Zend_OAuth) connection.

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 briefly covers what OAuth is and how its used to connect to sites in place of the more widespred method of a username/password combination. His script shows how to create the OAuth object with the right credentials and have it send a tweet as that login.

In a new tutorial from NETTUTS.com today they look at connecting Twitter and your CodeIgniter-based application via a curl interface (and caching the last tweet).

They help you configure your framework to autoload the database, create the table and built the model to fetch the latest tweets. Another function (update()) is created to post a new message out to the Twitter API. This involves a simple input form with a bit of validation wrapped around it.

Add in a few views to display the results to the user and some CSS to style it and you're all done. The post has the full code and screenshots included.

The CatsWhoCode.com blog has posted ten PHP code snippets that can help you connect with Twitter and perform certain actions like:

• Autofollow script
• Get Your Most Recent Twitter Status
• Twitter email grabber
• Timeline function
• RSS to Twitter
• Get the number of follower in full text

Those are the PHP examples from the list. There's a few more that are written in Ruby, Python and even a script that lets you update your status directly from vim.

DevShed finishes off their series looking at creating the Twitter "badges" for your site, complete with latest post and profile pic, in this fifth and final part. This time they focus on caching the results.

You may find that Twitter will start cutting off your requests. At first that may seem confusing, but keep in mind that regardless of where the image actually appears, the request always originates from the IP address of the web server where the script is located. To circumvent this pitfall, we can add a caching feature to our Twitter signature image application.

Their caching method involves two steps: saving the user information including the latest tweet and making a local copy of the profile pic (avatar). The details are cached into a local file with the XML returned from the feed request.

DevShed has posted the second-to-last part of their tutorial series about creating a Twitter "badge" for your site with the custom icon and latest tweet pulled from the site. This new part looks at handling exceptions thrown by their class.

This application serves a single purpose. It accepts an input and delivers an image to the browser. In the event of an error, the script halts execution and displays that error. The problem lies in this difference in output. The calling page is expecting an image and therefore won't display the error text. So to make this useful, it might be a good idea to deliver the error text as an image instead.

They show you how to build the custom exception handling interface and the code to create the exception that will use it.

DevShed has posted the third part of their series looking at the creation of dynamic twitter signatures. These signatures are the sort of badges you'd see on a site with the user's latest tweet and their photo.

In the third installment in this series, I will be demonstrating how to add proper object-oriented error handling to the SignatureImage class.

They've built up the class to take in a twitter username and, via a cURL request pull in both the account's avatar and latest tweets. If something goes wrong, though, the class needs to be modified to handle it. They show how to add in try/catch handling with an error handler method in the class to work with the error's result.

On their twitter account (a href="http://twitter.com/phpmagnet">phpmagnet) PHP Magazine have been conducting a survey of PHP frameworks and their popularity through out the community. They've gathered these statistics together into one trending page.

The data below is generated automatically from twitter. To cast your voice you can simply send a reply to @phpmagnet with frameworks you use, like, or suggest.

As it stands at the time of this post, Drupal seems to be at the top of the "interest" charts with CakePHP coming in second and Symfony in third. Zend Framework tops all three lists (Suggest/Like/Use) in popularity. You can read more about the project here.