Quickly Integrate Twitter and Drupal with RSS

We recently spruced up our blog with some more common features. One of these features happened to be displaying our Twitter feed in the sidebar, which you now see on bottom right of the blog. When asked to implement this feature, I set out for a Drupal solution.

We use have used Drupal to manage our website content for its flexibility, customizing where needed. After about two minutes of googling, I noticed the Drupal community suggested using the Twitter module. Discouraged by the necessity to carry around yet another Drupal module, I looked for another solution.

I am not a Tweeter (or is that Twitterer?), myself, but I did notice that Twitter offers an RSS feed for all of your tweets. Seeing that, I knew I could use the Drupal news aggregator to simply read the twitter feed and pull all of the tweets into drupal with cron.

All you need to do is:

1. copy your twitter RSS feed URL
2. enable the core aggregator module if you haven't done so already, be sure to also set the appropriate user permissions
3. add a new feed to the news aggregator with the URL of your twitter feed

A new block is automatically created for you, and you simply customize it and move it into place as you would with any other block. Viola - you can put your tweets anywhere on your site.

It's not a full integration where I can push tweets to twitter from my Drupal instance; but, it certainly fulfilled everything I was looking to accomplish. This is just another instance of using a common format for seamlessly integrating disparate sources of data, eliminating the need for a big, custom integration job. Now, I can include anything on the site with an Atom or RSS feed - like a custom Google News query on the latest industry happenings or our YouTube account's uploaded videos.

Hooray for standards.