July 4th, 2008 by alephnaught
Patch for Twitter Tools plugin’s timezone problem
Since I got an extra day off from work yesterday, I had some time to spend on solving a problem. I use Twitter Tools to display my five most recent tweets on my blog, as well as creating a digest post of my tweets every day, and a notification tweet of new posts to my blog. Its a really nice plugin and a good piece of work. But, it has a bug – Twitter returns tweets in UTC time, while some of the key comparisons inside Twitter Tools uses local time. This affected the digest posts; some tweets would appear on the wrong day.
It was hard to find all the comparison items and get them converted to UTC time, so I decided to convert the tweet time to local time using the setting in the WordPress application. I’ve posted this patch to the WordPress support forum at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/127916?replies=4#post-796201. Here’s the patch as well (this patch only applies to the 1.2b1 version):
*** twitter-tools.php.0 Sun Apr 13 20:07:12 2008
--- twitter-tools.php Thu Jul 3 13:06:44 2008
***************
*** 401,406 ****
--- 401,409 ----
function add() {
global $wpdb, $aktt;
+ // RLH: The next line corrects Twitter's UTC to WordPress timezone setting
+ $this->tw_created_at = $this->tw_created_at + (get_option('gmt_offset') * 3600);
+ // RLH: End changes
$wpdb->query("
INSERT
INTO $wpdb->aktt
***************
*** 1353,1358 ****
--- 1356,1364 ----
{
$now = time();
+ // RLH: Must shift "now" back to proper timezone to match WordPress
+ $now = $now + + (get_option('gmt_offset') * 3600);
+ // RLH: End changes
$time = gmmktime(
substr($date, 11, 2)
I hope that helps make this plugin more effective. Perhaps the author could eventually fix all the comparisons and we could go back to using UTC for everything, as I think that’s the right answer. But, this works for now.
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5 Comments
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+Bob Hays
- I'm a father and husband, have two schipperkes, like to read, compose music, travel. And I manage a couple software development teams at DIRECTV.
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10:17 am on July 5th, 2008
[…] fixed Twitter Tools on Thursday, and now I’ve fixed the page menu on my blog. Turns out the theme I’m using […]
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11:09 pm on July 24th, 2008
[…] a fairly big oversight for anyone who wants to call themselves a serious coder. Fortunately a kind soul found a solution to the twitter tools time problem… I hope. I’m going to patch tonight. Tomorrow’s digest post better be […]
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3:00 pm on August 15th, 2008
[…] a possible fix for Twitter Tools creating the summary posts and applied it to a new 1.2b1 version of the plugin. Hopefully it will cause the summaries to be […]
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8:34 am on September 24th, 2008
i’ve tried to get around to sending you this through email. this may be better.
i have a huge issue with twitter tools, same one you did, although i may have made it worse by deactivating, activating, upgrading, downgrading the plugin. it worked at one point, then it stopped when i tried to tinker with the schedule.
as you know, alex king is politely denying any mail and/or feedback. and i don’t know of any plugin that would replace his twitter daily digest.
anyway.. a search redirected me to you. i don’t know where to add the code. help?
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12:52 pm on October 5th, 2008
Lately, I’ve had to reset Twitter Tools and then reprocess (the two buttons near the bottom of the Twitter Tools settings page). I don’t know why this is happening, and since the author is pretty much useless for support, I just want everyone to know that you may have to do this regularly. At some point I may try to figure out what’s wrong.
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