How to pass route values to controllers in Laravel 4? - laravel

I am struggling to understand something that I am sure one of you will be able to easily explain. I am somewhat new to MVC so please bear with me.
I have created a controller that handles all of the work involved with connecting to the Twitter API and processing the returned JSON into HTML.
Route::get('/about', 'TwitterController#getTweets');
I then use:
return View::make('templates.about', array('twitter_html' => $twitter_html ))
Within my controller to pass the generated HTML to my view and everything works well.
My issue is that I have multiple pages that I use to display a different Twitter user's tweets on each page. What I would like to do is pass my controller an array of values (twitter handles) which it would then use in the API call. What I do not want to have to do is have a different Controller for each user group. If I set $twitter_user_ids within my Controller I can use that array to pull the tweets, but I want to set the array and pass it into the Controller somehow. I would think there would be something like
Route::get('/about', 'TwitterController#getTweets('twitter_id')');
But that last doesn't work.
I believe that my issue is related to variable scope somehow, but I could be way off.
Am I going down the wrong track here? How do I pass my Controllers different sets of data to produce different results?
EDIT - More Info
Markus suggested using Route Parameters, but I'm not sure that will work with what I am going for. Here is my specific use case.
I have an about page that will pull my tweets from Twitters API and display them on the page.
I also have a "Tweets" page that will pull the most recent tweets from several developers accounts and display them.
In both cases I have $twitter_user_ids = array() with different values in the array.
The controller that I have built takes that array of usernames and accesses the API and generates HTML which is passed to my view.
Because I am working with an array (the second of which is a large array), I don't think that Route Parameters will work.
Thanks again for the help. I couldn't do it without you all!

First of all, here's a quick tip:
Instead of
return View::make('templates.about', array('twitter_html' => $twitter_html ))
...use
return View::make('templates.about', compact('twitter_html'))
This creates the $twitter_html automatically for you. Check it out in the PHP Manual.
 
Now to your problem:
You did the route part wrong. Try:
Route::get('/about/{twitter_id}', 'TwitterController#getTweets');
This passes the twitter_id param to your getTweets function.
Check out the Laravel Docs: http://laravel.com/docs/routing#route-parameters

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HTH

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