Twitter Template in Articles

Hi. I'm wanting to get the Articles plugin to post to a Twitter account. I can see in the Articles manager screen --> Advanced Settings --> Notifications tab you can set to send to Twitter. I have set this to "yes" and authenticated the account.

The part that puzzles me is the Twitter Template - what should this be? A refernece to a chunk tpl? Or something else? I'm wanting to send the [[*pagetitle]] and [[*introtext]] along with a shortened URL.

Thanks in advance

The official word seems to be that the available placeholders are [[+title]] [[+url]] and [[+hashtags]]. Rather than referencing a chunk or whatever, it seems you insert any or all of these straight into the Articles manager screen --> Advanced Settings --> Notifications tab --> Twitter Template box. A few more words of documentation would be handy.

Nice one, David. We'll give that a try and will post back...

At this point I've concluded that the MODX Articles notification functions are broken enough that you're better off with a two-step method. It's more reliable, gives you much greater flexibility and allows you to post to Facebook and LinkedIn as well. Its only downside is that you will need to do some work to display MODX tags as Twitter hastags. Here it is:

• Create an RSS feed using MODX. http://rtfm.modx.com/extras/revo/getresources/getresources.examples/getresources.building-a-rss-feed.
• Publish the RSS feed as tweets, Facebook posts etc using a posting service like Twitterfeed http://twitterfeed.com.

TwitterFeed is free, fairly powerful, has integrated statistis and bit.ly integration, and generally does the job well - as long as you don't need to publish to Google+.

Let me mention that the Notify extra works with Articles. I use it all the time to post to Twitter and (via the #fb hashtag) to Facebook. It uses a Tpl chunk to start you off, but allows you to edit the Tweet manually before sending it. It also works to notify people of non-Articles resources or just send free-form Tweets. http://bobsguides.com/notify-tutorial.html

Personally, I don't want to automatically send a standard Tweet every time an Article is published or updated. I'd rather have control of when and if the Tweet gets sent, and how it's worded. YMMV.

Here is another tutorial on creating an RSS feed for your blog: http://bobsguides.com/blog.html/2013/08/19/create-an-rss-feed-for-your-articles-blog/.

In theory, Articles has a built-in RSS feed, but I've never gotten it to work.

Quote from: BobRay at Nov 02, 2013, 10:00 PM

Let me mention that the Notify extra works with Articles. I use it all the time to post to Twitter and (via the #fb hashtag) to Facebook. It uses a Tpl chunk to start you off, but allows you to edit the Tweet manually before sending it. It also works to notify people of non-Articles resources or just send free-form Tweets. http://bobsguides.com/notify-tutorial.html

Personally, I don't want to automatically send a standard Tweet every time an Article is published or updated. I'd rather have control of when and if the Tweet gets sent, and how it's worded. YMMV.

Here is another tutorial on creating an RSS feed for your blog: http://bobsguides.com/blog.html/2013/08/19/create-an-rss-feed-for-your-articles-blog/.

In theory, Articles has a built-in RSS feed, but I've never gotten it to work.

Yes, I knew there was another good solution around and couldn't remember what it was. I've added this use of Notify to my MODX site set-up tutorial: http://shorewalker.com/site-building/modx/how-to-set-up-a-modx-site.html.

FWIW, I did get the Articles feed to work, but it has some limitations.

Twitter publishing in Articles does have several critical bugs. One I've discovered, and I'm curious if others have as well, is that it tweets the incorrect URL if you are dating your URLs. It sends the URL without the month/date/year for example.
This is rather frustrating and I've tried to fix it but the code actually seems like it should work correctly.
Another really special thing it seems to do is insert a # regardless of if any tags are used, so there will bra pointless # at the end of your tweet.
I've also seen it tweet 'Error #' which is pretty funny.

Yep, I've seen all of these. More reasons why Bob Ray's Notify or Twitterfeed are better bets.

I'm actually all for removing the feature from Articles and assigning the process of re-adding it correctly to whoever complains the most

+1 for removing it. I think sending an automatic, machine-generated Tweet every time you publish (or worse yet, correct a typo) is counter-productive and often just annoys your audience.

For those thinking of trying Notify, I should mentions that you should also install Subscribe since Notify uses some of its services.