Twitter Blackbird Pie WordPress Plugin Updated

UPDATE : check out the new Blackbird Pie plugin page

We recently updated the Twitter Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin to version 0.2.5. The update only included bug fixes, including the major bug that stopped alot of people from using the plugin: no support for non-english tweets. This meant that when you embedded a tweet that contained certain Latin or Chinese characters, the plugin spat out some weird looking numbers instead. Here are some screenshots of the problem :

This bug made me angry! Why was this happening? Good question! The answer lay within a small helper class posted in the PHP manual’s htmlentities function definition. Thanks Montana, whoever you may be, for posting the code. The code translates the special characters into their NCR[numeric character reference] representation. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense – it didn’t make sense to me the first time either.

I then updated the plugin and committed the changes back into SVN. All was good (for the time being). This is what we got now:

So I thought my work was done. @gillesbruno on twitter had also asked me to update the plugin, so I thought I would include one of his tweets in this post. The first tweet of his I embedded came out blank! Shock, shock, horror! Now I was really thinking WTF. It turned out to be the quotes used in the tweet text. So I added in some simple calls to addslashes() and stripslashes() and its all sorted now.

So some thanks must go out to @danielvoicu and @gillesbruno for forcing me to make this a better plugin. Especially to Daniel who blogged about the problem initially.

And I couldn’t write this post without showing off the plugin, so here are some “pies” with some special characters:

Upgrade to the latest version (0.2.5) and tweet away! On my TODO list is to make it easier to embed the tweets by adding a button to the post editor which displays a popup where you can enter a Twitter username and select a tweet to embed. COMING SOON!!