Whilst looking for a plugin that would display my latest tweet on my homepage, I came across this post. I hadn’t realised it was such an easy task, hardly requiring an entire plugin.

I decided to adapt the code a bit, as fetch_rss() is now deprecated and I also wanted to display the date and time of the tweet, which this code doesn’t do as is.

I’m sure this isn’t really anything new, but I was just pleased with how simple it is to do. Here’s the code I came up with:

function latest_tweet(){
	$tweet_feed = fetch_feed('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/135931380.rss');
	$tweet = $tweet_feed->get_items(0, 1);
 	echo '<p>' . $tweet[0]->get_date('jS F, G:i') . '</p>';
	echo '<p>' . str_replace('rosshanney: ', '', $tweet[0]->get_content()) . '</p>';
}

That bit goes in your theme’s functions.php. Then you just need to add this next bit into your template files wherever you want the tweet to appear.

<?php latest_tweet(); ?>

I’ll go through the functions.php code line by line.

$tweet_feed = fetch_feed('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/135931380.rss');

This line uses the fetch_feed() function to retrieve the twitter feed. It is returned as a SimplePie object. You’ll need to replace the feed URL with your own, which you can find in the sidebar of your Twitter profile.

$tweet = $tweet_feed->get_items(0, 1);

We just want the latest tweet, so this line uses the get_items() function to extract only the most recent tweet. You could easily change the paramaters here to show more tweets.

echo '<p>' . $tweet[0]->get_date('jS F, G:i') . '</p>';

This line outputs the date and time the tweet was posted using the get_date() function. You can easily change the way that the date is formatted by adjusting the date format string. You can use any of the PHP date format thingies.

echo '<p>' . str_replace('rosshanney: ', '', $tweet[0]->get_content()) . '</p>';

The last line uses the get_content() function to output the tweet itself. I’ve used str_replace() to remove my username from the start of the tweet, but you don’t have to do this.

Not bad for four lines of code

As John Kolbert says, WordPress caches the tweet(s) for a while, so this may not be the solution for those who tweet very often.

Update : Shortly after posting I found a nice way to automatically link any @replies, #hashtags or URLs in your tweets, requiring only a small change to the above code. Check out this post.

Update : I’ve extended this a bit more to deal with Twitter not responding, in this post.