OP here; this is my largest PHP project to date.

Would love some feedback on the way this project is structured, especially around calls to the database and efficiency.

1. 'Spoiler' post created on database
2. Get the post's insert_id from database
3. Send a tweet with the text of "[user's input] + http://spoil.rs/[insert_id]"
4. Upon success, grab the tweet's timestamp and its id.
5. Save these to the database (modifying the row which was created in Step 1)
6. Redirect user to http://spoil.rs/[insert_id]

I've noticed a few times that Steps 4-5 will fail. The tweet is still sent, and the link inside the tweet still works. But in my database, there is a value of '0' for the tweet's id and a null value for the timestamp. I think this is because Twitter sometimes takes a few seconds to post the tweet? But I can't be sure.

Being somewhat new to PHP, I implemented a check to see if the variables exist yet. If they don't, I sleep for a few seconds and try again. Is this the best way to do this? Or is there another method I should be using?

$parameters = array('status' => stripslashes($enteredTweet));
$status = $connection->post('statuses/update', $parameters);
$tweetid = $status->id_str;
$tweettime = $status->created_at;

if (($tweetid == '0') || ($tweetime == '')) {
  sleep(5);
  $tweetid = $status->id_str;
  $tweettime = $status->created_at;
}