Using Twitter OAuth to authenticate API calls for trends - twitter

Question

I am working on a website that allows the user to search for the top ten twitter trends in a city or country. At first I was only relying on Twitter's Rest API, but I was having a lot of rate limit issues (at school my rate limit disappears faster than I have a chance to use it). I know that authenticating my API calls will help me to better deal with this issue (Authenticated API calls are charged to the authenticating user’s limit while unauthenticated API calls are deducted from the calling IP address’ allotment).
I implemented #abraham's PHP library (https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth), unfortunately my API calls aren't being authenticated. I know I have implemented #abraham's PHP library, because it prints out my user information at the end like it should. I have my twitter trend search underneath it but the API call isn't being authenticated. I am not sure how to fix this, and any help would really be appreciated!
This is what I use to get the top ten trends by country:
function showContent(){
// we're going to point to Yahoo's APIs
$BASE_URL = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql";
// the following code should only run if we've submitted a form
if(isset($_REQUEST['location']))
{
// set a variable named "location" to whatever we passed from the form
$location = $_REQUEST['location'];
// Form YQL query and build URI to YQL Web service in two steps:
// first, we show the query
$yql_query = "select woeid from geo.places where text='$location'";
// then we combine the $BASE_URL and query (urlencoded) together
$yql_query_url = $BASE_URL . "?q=" . urlencode($yql_query) . "&format=json";
//var_dump($location);
// show what we're calling
// echo $yql_query_url;
// Make call with cURL (curl pulls webpages - it's very common)
$session = curl_init($yql_query_url);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$json = curl_exec($session);
// Convert JSON to PHP object
$phpObj = json_decode($json);
// Confirm that results were returned before parsing
if(!is_null($phpObj->query->results)){
// Parse results and extract data to display
foreach($phpObj->query->results as $result){
//var_dump($result);
$woeid = $result[0]->woeid;
if (is_numeric ($location))
{
echo "<span style='color:red; padding-left: 245px;'>Please enter a city or a country</span>";
}
else if(empty($result)){
echo "No results found";
}
else {
/* echo "The woeid of $location is $woeid <br />"; */
}
}
}
$jsontrends=file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/trends/".$woeid.".json");
$phpObj2 = json_decode($jsontrends, true);
echo "<h3 style='margin-top:20px'>TRENDS: ".$phpObj2[0]['locations'][0]['name']."</h3> \r\n";
$data = $phpObj2[0]['trends'];
foreach ($data as $item) {
echo "<br />".$item['name']."\r\n";
echo "<br /> \r\n";
}
if(empty($item)){
echo "No results found";
}
}
}
I then add it to #abraham's html.inc file (along with some php to see the rate limit status) and html.inc is included in the index.php:
<h1>Top Twitter Trends</h1>
<form name='mainForm' method="get">
<input name='location' id='location' type='text'/><br/>
<button id='lookUpTrends'>Submit</button>
</form>
<?php showContent();
$ratelimit = file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/account/rate_limit_status.json");
echo $ratelimit;
?>
</div>
#abraham's index.php file has some example calls, and since my call doesn't look like this I think that is probably why it isn't being authenticated.
/* Some example calls */
//$connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => date(DATE_RFC822)));
//$connection->post('statuses/destroy', array('id' => 5437877770));
//$connection->post('friendships/create', array('id' => 9436992));
//$connection->post('friendships/destroy', array('id' => 9436992));
Please help me find what I need to fix so that my API calls are authenticated.
update 10-21
I think in order to make an authenticated API call I need to include something like this is my code:
$connection->get('trends/place', array('id' => $woeid));
It didn't fix my problem, but maybe it is on the right track?

Answer 1

First off, you'll find that keeping your PHP and HTML separate will really help streamline your code and keep logical concerns separate (aggregating the data and displaying it are two different concerns)(many PHPers like MVC).
The code you have shared appears to be correct. My guess is that the issue lies in the creation of the OAuth connection, which should look something like:
<?php
/* Create TwitteroAuth object with app key/secret and token key/secret from default phase */
$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, $token,$secret);
Where CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET are from your Trends Test app and $token and $secret are from the user signing in to twitter and allowing your app permission. Are all these values showing up when you create the TwitterOAuth object?
Also, be sure you update the config items in the twitteroauth.php file (specifically line 21 should be set to use the 1.1 API and line 29 should be set to 'json').