In past templates we have used the very capable zuTwitter module for joomla twitter integration, but we recently stumbled upon the awesome jQuery twitter script by sea of clouds . The Tweet script has a nice range of options to personalise your twitter stream which make twitter integration into your joomla site a good deal more flexible.

The jTweet module comes with the following options that are native to t the tweet script:

• Set the number of tweets to display
• Choose whether to display your avatar or not
• Select whether to display just your tweets or all tweets related to a particular topic
• Select auto join phrases according to the nature of your tweet eg specific intro text for replies, verbs, replying to tweets and more.
• Set the text to appear while the tweets loads.
• Filter your own tweets via keywords. eg only display tweets that contain the word "joomla".

Demo

Here is an example of the jTweets module in action its streaming tweets from the main Joomla Bamboo account.

Here is a snapshot of the module parameters

Styling the tweets

The look and feel of your tweets is controlled by the css file called jTweet.css. It slocated in the mod_jTweets folder on your joomla site.

Here is the css that we have used in the example on the site:

.tweet {font-family: Georgia, serif;padding: 0;margin: 0}
.tweet .tweet_list {list-style-type: none;margin: 0; padding: 0;}
#leftCol ul.tweet_list li a,ul.tweet_list li a {border: none;}
.tweet .tweet_list li {overflow: hidden;padding: 4px;}
.tweet .tweet_list .tweet_odd {background-color: #ffff;border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;}
.tweet .tweet_list .tweet_even {background-color: #f9f9f9;border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;}
.tweet .tweet_list .tweet_avatar {padding:4px;margin: 0;float: left; }
.tweet .tweet_list .tweet_avatar img { vertical-align: middle;margin: 0;border: 1px solid #ddd;padding: 4px; }
.tweet_text {font-size: 0.9em;font-style: italic;}

So as you can see its very easy to play around with colours, font sizes and borders to get the feel you want for the module. This is release v1.0 sostay tuned for some a more divers range of pre-made themes for this module.