abutton / pyclasstwitter

Pyclass Twitter

Introduction

For today's assignment, I have several co-conspirators that helped me think of a fantastic exercise to flex your python skills. At the sprint we are tracking tweets with a hashtag "#emeraldsprint". As we are self-aggrandizing programmers who don't trust twitter to properly archive our tweets, we are requesting that by the end of the weekend we can run a script which sends a multi-part html email with all of the tweets with that hashtag, including images, which must be embedded in the email (not linked) which will then be run and sent to all of the Plone developers as a "sprint report" on Monday night.

To complete this, please break into 3 teams and divide up the task:

• Team 1 will work with the twitter API to get the tweets and put them into a standard data format. Use the API, don't scrape! We have already looked at the Twitter API before so I'm not going to give you any hints on where to start this time!
• Team 2 will mock up the html to be emailed given input from Team 1. You could use a template library if you are feeling saucy. You could not. Your call. Test the output in a browser for starters.
• Team 3 will take the output from team 2 and send the email, with multi-part attached images. Please take time to investigate what that means if you aren't sure. We have dealt a little bit with this api before so most of it should be familiar.

The main function signature should be:

def send_hashtag_report(hashtag, email_to)

Despite working on 3 different teams depending on input, you should be working on your different parts at the same time.

HINTS

• Set up and work from a github repo where everyone has write access. Kellan - please don't set this up for them this time :) Put each team's work in a separate file to avoid merge conflicts.
• Put any test cases in a directory called tests, with a different test file for each module. They should be runnable with nose. It's up to you how many you write - do whats useful for your own and others' development first and if time add test cases for correctness.
• Before breaking up, you might want to decide on method signatures and datatypes for integration.
• Since you are working with functions that haven't been written yet, writing your own test cases to make sure things work right will help a LOT.
• Throughout the day, we will be trolling you with tweets to try and break your stuff. Muahaha...

Good luck and may the force be with you!

Function Signatures

We decided to write our tests using the following function signatures.

def send_hashtag_report(hashtag, *email_to):
    pass

def get_tweets(hashtag):
    pass

def get_image(image_url):
    pass

def prepare_email(tweets):
    pass

def send_email(content, addresses, host, port, to, from, subject, images):
    pass

To Run

The main calling function - send_hashtag_report, takes two parameters: the hashtag you're searching for, and a list of email addresses to send the results to. The send_email function (which is called by send_hashtag_report), has several parameters which can be customized, but probably of most interest are the "from_address" and "subject." Right now they're set as "[e-mail]" and "Emerald Sprint Report", but they can be changed to whatever you'd like.

The emails are constructed using two templates found in the template directory. They're being populated using the jinja2 library. See the docs for more info: http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/. To run the script, after you've customized it appropriately, just type the following in the terminal:

python plone_egos.py

Finally, the script requires the following non-standard libraries, all of which can be install using the commands below: "requests, jinja2, premailer".

pip install requests
pip install jinja2
pip install premailer