What's the best way to use the Twitter API via PHP?

Question

A client would like me to add their Twitter stream to their website homepage, using a custom solution built in PHP.

The Twitter API obviously has a limited number of

Answer 1

It will be quite easy, once you can pull down a timeline and display it, to then add some file-based-caching to it.

check age of cache
Is it more than 5 mins old?
    fetch the latest information
    regenerate the HTML for output
    save the finished HTML to disk
display the cached pre-prepared HTML

PEAR's Cache_Lite will do all you need on the caching layer.