Why are some contrib module functions not recognized?

Question

I can't seem to get the latest twitter module to work with my site.

I have a custom module that does some sanity checks on user-imported twitter accounts and my site keeps failing at this point. After some digging I noticed the twitter module functino twitter_account_load() is not recognized at all.

Devel test code to reproduce:

dpm(module_load_all()); // returns 1
dpm(module_exists('twitter')); // returns 1
dpm(twitter_account_load('@twitter')); // returns white screen of death

Apache error log:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function twitter_account_load() in /var/www/mysite/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/contrib/devel/devel.module(1285) : eval()'d code on line 4, referer: http://my.site.com/devel/php

Drupal Version 7.26 Twitter Version 7.x-5.8

What I have tried so far:

• Cache cleared
• Twitter module upgrade to latest 5.8
• Cache cleared
• Twitter module reinstall
• Cache cleared
• ...

Nothing worked.

Any idea why?

Answer 1

Do module load include of twitter.inc in which above function was defined.. .module files are automatically included, but .inc are not. So you need to include them using above function...

module_load_include('inc', 'twitter', 'twitter');
dpm(module_load_all()); // returns 1
dpm(module_exists('twitter')); // returns 1
dpm(twitter_account_load('@twitter'));