If you’ve tried Share Extras‘s Twitter add-ons recently then you might know that the Twitter Dashlets add-on for Alfresco 4 bundles up two similarly-named add-ons that I released last year.
Using the dashlets that the add-on provides, you can follow a particular user or Twitter list, or follow the results of a Twitter search, direct from your Share Dashboard. Great for monitoring the results of a social media campaign related to a particular site, or just topics that are important to you.
But the dashlet that I’m now using the most is the Twitter Timeline dashlet that allows you to easily connect to Twitter’s authenticated resources via OAuth, which I showed at last year’s Alfresco DevCon.
Release 2.5 tidies up a number of bugs but more importantly now provides a consistent experience across all three dashlets, in a couple of areas.
You can view a short video of the updated dashlets or submit feedback on the Share Extras site.
Authenticated access
The Reply, Retweet and Favorite actions were always present on the Twitter Timeline dashlet but now also appear on the other dashlets too, if you have previously connected your Share user account to a Twitter profile.

This has the added benefit that you will be able to view the protected tweets of any users you follow in the Twitter Feed dashlet, since requests will always be authenticated whenever you are connected.
Notifications
All three dashlets will periodically poll for new Tweets, and the notifications have been made more compact and added into the dashlet title bar

To load the new tweets, just click the green notification icon.
More options for Search results
The Twitter Search dashlet now allows you to choose between recent tweets, ‘top’ tweets as rated by Twitter, or a mix of the two.