Ah, Twitter, your API used to be so awesome, before you went and implemented the crap known as OAuth 1.0. However, since you decided to force your entire development community over a barrel about it, I suppose Twython has to support this. So, that said...
If you used this library and it all stopped working, it's because of the Authentication method change.
Twitter recently disabled the use of "Basic Authentication", which is why, if you used Twython previously, you probably started getting a ton of 401 errors. To fix this, we should note one thing...
You need to change how authentication works in your program/application. If you're using a command line application or something, you'll probably languish in hell for a bit, because OAuth wasn't really designed for those types of use cases. Twython cannot help you with that or fix the annoying parts of OAuth.
If you need OAuth, though, Twython now supports it, and ships with a skeleton Django application to get you started. Enjoy!
Twython (for versions of Python before 2.6) requires a library called "simplejson". Depending on your flavor of package manager, you can do the following...
(pip install | easy_install) simplejson
Twython also requires the (most excellent) OAuth2 library for handling OAuth tokens/signing/etc. Again...
(pip install | easy_install) oauth2
Installing Twython is fairly easy. You can...
(pip install | easy_install) twython
...or, you can clone the repo and install it the old fashioned way.
git clone git://github.com/ryanmcgrath/twython.git
cd twython
sudo python setup.py install
from twython import Twython
twitter = Twython()
results = twitter.search(q = "bert")
# More function definitions can be found by reading over twython/twitter_endpoints.py, as well
# as skimming the source file. Both are kept human-readable, and are pretty well documented or
# very self documenting.As of version 1.3, Twython has been extensively overhauled. Most API endpoint definitions are stored in a separate Python file, and the class itself catches calls to methods that match up in said table.
Certain functions require a bit more legwork, and get to stay in the main file, but for the most part it's all abstracted out.
As of Twython 1.3, the syntax has changed a bit as well. Instead of Twython.core, there's a main Twython class to import and use. If you need to catch exceptions, import those from twython as well.
Arguments to functions are now exact keyword matches for the Twitter API documentation - that means that whatever query parameter arguments you read on Twitter's documentation (http://dev.twitter.com/doc) gets mapped as a named argument to any Twitter function.
For example: the search API looks for arguments under the name "q", so you pass q="query_here" to search().
Doing this allows us to be incredibly flexible in querying the Twitter API, so changes to the API aren't held up from you using them by this library.
There's an experimental version of Twython that's made for Python 3k. This is currently not guaranteed to work in all situations, but it's provided so that others can grab it and hack on it. If you choose to try it out, be aware of this.
OAuth is now working thanks to updates from Hades. You'll need to grab his Python 3 branch for python-oauth2 to have it work, though.
My hope is that Twython is so simple that you'd never have to ask any questions, but if you feel the need to contact me for this (or other) reasons, you can hit me up at ryan@venodesigns.net.
Twython is released under an MIT License - see the LICENSE file for more information.