How to Display Twitter Followers Count and More in WordPress

We have previously written about a code that lets you display twitter followers count which was contributed by Rarst. In this article, we will be sharing a more advanced and more elegant code which lets you display twitter followers count in WordPress. Once again this script was also contributed by Rarst.

Features

This function is not limited to followers count. It can fetch any non-nested value returned by Twitter users/show API method.

It has two levels of cache:

• queried values are stored as array in database, using WP options, for $interval seconds;
• API responses are stored in memory so you can query any number of fields, without generating multiply API requests.

This should be safe to use for multiply values and multiply users at the same time, without worrying about exhausting API limit.

Tutorial

First open your theme’s functions.php file and add the following code:

    function rarst_twitter_user( $username, $field, $display = false ) {
    $interval = 3600;
    $cache = get_option('rarst_twitter_user');
    $url = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name='.urlencode($username);

    if ( false == $cache )
    $cache = array();

    // if first time request add placeholder and force update
    if ( !isset( $cache[$username][$field] ) ) {
    $cache[$username][$field] = NULL;
    $cache[$username]['lastcheck'] = 0;
    }

    // if outdated
    if( $cache[$username]['lastcheck'] < (time()-$interval) ) {

    // holds decoded JSON data in memory
    static $memorycache;

    if ( isset($memorycache[$username]) ) {
    $data = $memorycache[$username];
    }
    else {
    $result = wp_remote_retrieve_body(wp_remote_request($url));
    $data = json_decode( $result );
    if ( is_object($data) )
    $memorycache[$username] = $data;
    }

    if ( is_object($data) ) {
    // update all fields, known to be requested
    foreach ($cache[$username] as $key => $value)
    if( isset($data->$key) )
    $cache[$username][$key] = $data->$key;

    $cache[$username]['lastcheck'] = time();
    }
    else {
    $cache[$username]['lastcheck'] = time()+60;
    }

    update_option( 'rarst_twitter_user', $cache );
    }

    if ( false != $display )
    echo $cache[$username][$field];
    return $cache[$username][$field];
    }

Usage

Once you have pasted the function, now you can use the code in any WordPress template file you like. Simply paste the following code:

echo rarst_twitter_user('wpbeginner', 'name').' has '.
rarst_twitter_user('wpbeginner', 'followers_count').' followers after '.
rarst_twitter_user('wpbeginner', 'statuses_count').' updates.';

The above code will display something like this:

WPBeginner has 5846 followers after 1300 updates.

Source: Rarst