Twitter dashlets for Alfresco Share

Author: Will Abson

This project defines three custom dashlets which you can use to interact with Twitter from within Alfresco Share.

The dashlets require Alfresco 4.0 or greater, plus the Share OAuth add-on version 2.2 (Alfresco 4.0) or v2.3.0 (Alfresco 4.1+).

The Twitter Feed dashlet displays recent Tweets from a Twitter user or list of your choice.

The Twitter Search dashlet displays the results of a Twitter search in real-time, using the Twitter search API.

Last but not least, the Twitter Timeline dashlet allows you to view your own Home timeline, mentions, favorites and direct messages.

You can view messages in the dashlet, and the standard Favorite, Reply and Retweet actions are available, as well as the ability to post a new Tweet.

Installation

Before installing the dashlets please ensure that you have installed the Share OAuth extension, version 2.3.0 or greater.

The dashlets are packaged inside a single file for easy installation into Alfresco Share. You can choose to install using an AMP file or a JAR file.

• To install the AMP file (recommended), please use Alfresco's Module Management Tool.

• Or, to install the JAR, simply drop the twitter-dashlets-{version}.jar file into the tomcat/shared/lib folder within your Alfresco installation, and restart the application server. You might need to create this folder if it does not already exist. See Troubleshooting if you have problems.

Building from Source

The dashlet is packaged as a single file for easy installation into Alfresco Share.

To build the project, run Ant from the base project directory.

ant

The script will build an AMP file and a JAR file in the build/dist directory within your project, which can then be installed as per the instructions in Installation, above.

Or, to deploy the JAR file into a local Tomcat instance for testing, you can use the hotcopy-tomcat-jar task. You will need to set the tomcat.home property in Ant.

ant -Dtomcat.home=C:/Alfresco/tomcat hotcopy-tomcat-jar

Once you have deployed the JAR file you will need to restart Tomcat so that the additional resources are picked up.

Usage

1. Log in to Alfresco Share and navigate to your user dashboard (the Twitter Feed and Twitter Search dashlets can also be placed on a site dashboard).
2. Click the Customize Dashboard button to edit the contents of the dashboard and drag the dashlet into one of the columns from the list of dashlets.
3. Click the Connect button to connect the dashlet to your Twitter account, if you have not previously done so. This must be done by all users, but once done the dashlet will remember your identity and any other Twitter dashlets will pick up the same information.
4. For the Twitter Feed and Search dashlets, use the Configure button to change the feed displayed (you can specify any Twitter username on its own, or any list belonging to a user as username/listname) or the search term used.

Known Issues

Could not connect to Twitter as OAuth support is not available. Please contact your administrator.

This status may be shown in the dashlets if the Share OAuth add-on is not found. You must ensure that you have installed Share OAuth into both the repository and Share applications.

Credits

Connect and disconnect icons from LED icon pack by LED 24