5 Laconica 0.8.0 ("Shiny Happy People")
8 This is the README file for Laconica, the Open Source microblogging
9 platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
10 options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for
11 administrators. Information on using Laconica can be found in the
12 "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.
17 Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source
18 microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or
19 group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users
20 can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or
21 colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites
22 like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.
24 With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones,
25 instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed
26 desktop clients that support the Twitter API.
28 Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
29 <http://openmicroblogging.org/> that lets users on different Web sites
30 or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It
31 enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.
33 Laconica was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
34 Identi.ca <http://identi.ca/>. It is shared with you in hope that you
35 too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn
36 more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.1:
38 http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd
43 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
44 it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
45 published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
46 License, or (at your option) any later version.
48 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
49 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
50 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
51 Affero General Public License for more details.
53 You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public
54 License along with this program, in the file "COPYING". If not, see
55 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
57 IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
58 *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
59 you make modifications to the Laconica source code on your server,
60 you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code
61 to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement
62 of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your
63 modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL LACONICA*.
65 Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib'
66 directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under
67 liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's
68 particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory
74 This is a major feature release since version 0.7.4, released May 31
75 2009. Notable changes this version:
77 - Support for a hosted service (status network). Multiple sites can
78 share the same codebase but use different databases.
79 - OEmbed. Links to pages that support OEmbed (http://www.oembed.com/)
80 become popup links, and the media are shown in a special lightbox.
81 - File attachments. Users can attach files of the size and type approved
82 by an administrator, and a shortened link will be included in the
84 - Related notices are organized into conversations, with each reply a
85 branch in a tree. Conversations have pages and are linked to from each
86 notice in the conversation.
87 - User designs. Users can specify colours and backgrounds
88 for their profile pages and other "personal" pages.
89 - Group designs. Group administrators can specify similar designs for
90 group profiles and related pages.
91 - Site designs. Site authors can specify a design (background and
93 - New themes. Five new themes are added to the base release; these show
94 off the flexibility of Laconica's theming system.
95 - Statistics. Public sites will periodically send usage statistics,
96 configuration options, and dependency information to Laconica dev site.
97 This will help us understand how the software is used and plan future
98 versions of the software.
99 - Additional hooks. The hooks and plugins system introduced in 0.7.x was
100 expanded with additional points of access.
101 - Facebook Connect. A new plugin allows logging in with Facebook Connect
102 (http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php).
103 - A session handler. A new optional session handler class to manage PHP
104 sessions reliably and quickly for large sites.
105 - STOMP queuing. Queue management for offline daemons has been
106 abstracted with three concrete instances. A new interface that should
107 work with STOMP servers like ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ is available, which
108 should make things scale better.
109 - Group block. Group admins can block users from joining or posting to
111 - Group aliases. Groups can be referred to with aliases, additional
112 names. For example, "!yul" and "!montreal" can be the same group.
113 - Bidirectional Twitter bridge. Users can read the tweets their Twitter
114 friends post on Twitter.
115 - Adaptation of WordPress.com Terms of Service (http://en.wordpress.com/tos/)
116 as default TOS for Laconica sites.
117 - Better command-line handling for scripts, including standard options
118 and ability to set hostname and path from the command line.
119 - An experimental plugin to use Meteor (http://www.meteorserver.org/)
120 for "real-time" updates.
121 - A new framework for "real-time" updates, making it easier to develop
122 plugins for different browser-based update modes.
123 - RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds for groups.
124 - RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds for tags.
125 - Attachments can be sent by email.
126 - Attachments are encoded as enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom.
127 - Notices with attachments display in Facebook as media inline.
129 - Many, many bug fixes.
134 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
137 - PHP 5.2.3+. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
138 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
140 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
141 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
142 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
143 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
144 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
145 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
146 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
148 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
150 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
151 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
152 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
153 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
154 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
155 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
157 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
159 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
160 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
161 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
162 server to store the data in.
163 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
164 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
165 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
166 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
167 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
169 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
170 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
171 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
172 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
177 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
178 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
179 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
180 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
181 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
182 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
184 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
185 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
186 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
187 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
188 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
189 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
190 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
191 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
192 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
193 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
194 but won't work with OpenID.
195 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
196 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
197 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
198 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
199 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
200 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
201 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
202 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
203 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
204 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
205 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
206 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
207 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
208 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
209 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
211 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
212 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
213 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
214 - PEAR Validate is an oEmbed dependency.
215 - PEAR Net_URL2 is an oEmbed dependency.
216 - Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options.
218 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
219 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
220 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
221 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
222 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
223 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
228 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
229 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
231 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
232 command like this will work:
234 tar zxf laconica-0.8.0.tar.gz
236 ...which will make a laconica-0.8.0 subdirectory in your current
237 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
238 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
239 files to the server.)
241 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
242 directory. Usually something like this will work:
244 mv laconica-0.8.0 /var/www/mublog
246 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
247 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
248 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
249 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
250 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
252 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
254 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
256 On some systems, this will probably work:
258 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
259 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
261 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
262 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
263 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
265 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar, background, and
266 file subdirectories writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do
269 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
270 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/background
271 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/file
273 You can also make the avatar, background, and file directories
274 writeable by the Web server group, as noted above.
276 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
279 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
281 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
282 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
285 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
286 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
287 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
289 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
290 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
293 GRANT ALL on laconica.*
294 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
295 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
297 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
298 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
301 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
303 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
305 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
306 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
307 almost-empty database.
309 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
310 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
311 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
312 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
313 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
314 URLs are stored in the database.
319 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
320 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
323 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
325 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
328 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
330 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
332 http://example.org/mublog/fred
334 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
335 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
336 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
339 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
340 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
341 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
342 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
343 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
344 just leaving the .htaccess file.
346 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
347 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
348 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
350 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
352 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
354 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
357 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
359 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
365 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
366 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
367 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
368 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
369 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
371 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
372 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
374 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
375 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
376 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
377 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
378 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
383 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
384 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
385 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
386 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
387 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
388 configuration is essentially email configuration.
390 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
391 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
392 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
393 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
395 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
396 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
398 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
401 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
403 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
404 that support email SMS gateways.
406 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
408 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
410 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
411 of a filter than a daemon.
413 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
415 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
417 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
418 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
422 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
425 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
427 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
429 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
430 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
431 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
432 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
437 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
438 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
439 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
440 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
443 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
444 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
445 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
447 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
448 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
449 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
450 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
452 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
453 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
454 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
456 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
457 configuration section.
459 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
460 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
461 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
462 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
463 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
464 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
466 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
467 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
468 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
469 off of amd64 to another server.
474 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
475 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
476 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
478 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
479 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
481 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
483 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
484 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
485 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
486 consider setting up queues and daemons.
491 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
492 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
493 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
494 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
495 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
496 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
497 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
499 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
500 installed on whatever server you use.
502 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
503 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
504 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
505 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
507 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
508 server!), set the following variable:
510 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
512 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
513 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
514 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
515 They're not created automatically.
517 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
518 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
519 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
521 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
523 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
524 them as notices in the database.
525 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
526 registered users who should receive them.
527 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
528 public feed listeners.
529 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
530 recipients on foreign servers.
531 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
533 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
535 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
536 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
537 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
538 of the built-in Facebook application.
540 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
541 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
542 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
543 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
544 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
545 to check their status and keep them running.
547 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
548 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
551 With version 0.8.0, it's now possible to use a STOMP server instead of
552 our kind of hacky home-grown DB-based queue solution. See the "queues"
553 config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this
554 writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ (
556 Twitter Friends Syncing
557 -----------------------
559 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
560 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
561 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
562 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
563 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
565 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
566 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
567 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
568 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
569 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
573 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
574 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
576 Built-in Facebook Application
577 -----------------------------
579 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
580 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
581 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
582 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
583 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
584 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
585 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
588 Quick setup instructions*:
590 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
592 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
594 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
595 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
596 key and secret, e.g.:
598 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
599 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
600 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
602 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
604 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
605 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
606 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
607 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
609 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
610 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
611 Facebook application you created.)
613 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
614 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
615 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
616 Everything else can be left with default values.
618 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
621 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
626 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
627 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
628 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
631 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
632 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
633 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
634 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
635 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
636 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
637 available through HTTP.
639 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
641 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
643 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
644 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
645 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
646 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
647 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
649 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
650 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
651 following to your robots.txt file:
653 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
655 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
656 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
657 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
663 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
664 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
665 basis for other sites.
667 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
668 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
669 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
670 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
672 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
673 the config.php file. See below for details.
675 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
676 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
679 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
680 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
682 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
684 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
685 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
686 users who don't upload their own.
687 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
688 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
689 listing on profile pages.
691 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
694 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
695 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
696 modification to use the new output format.
701 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
702 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
703 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
704 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
706 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
707 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
708 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
709 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
714 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
715 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
716 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
717 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
722 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
723 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
724 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
725 management, but host it on a public server.
727 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
728 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
729 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
730 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
731 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
732 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
733 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
734 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
739 IMPORTANT NOTE: Laconica 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some
740 incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). For new
741 installations, it will now store non-ASCII characters correctly.
742 However, older installations will have the incorrect storage, and will
743 consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal
746 If you've been using Laconica 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've
747 been tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably
748 want to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated
749 upgrade procedure in Laconica 0.8.0. Try these step-by-step
750 instructions; read to the end first before trying them.
752 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
754 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
755 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
756 backup. You have been warned.
757 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
758 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
760 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
761 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
762 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
763 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
764 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
765 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
766 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
767 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
768 final backup of the Web directory and database.
769 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
770 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.8.0 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
771 wherever your code used to be.
772 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
773 directory to your new directory.
774 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
775 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
776 10. Rebuild the database. NOTE: this step is destructive and cannot be
777 reversed. YOU CAN EASILY DESTROY YOUR SITE WITH THIS STEP. Don't
778 do it without a known-good backup!
780 If your database is at version 0.7.4, you can run a special upgrade
783 mysql -u<rootuser> -p<rootpassword> <database> db/074to080.sql
785 Otherwise, go to your Laconica directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A
786 BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
788 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
790 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
791 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
792 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as. Note that rebuilddb.sh drops
793 your database and rebuilds it; if there is an error you have no
794 database. Make sure you have a backup.
795 For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
796 which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
797 script before running it.
798 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
799 the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
800 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
801 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
802 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
804 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
805 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
806 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
809 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
810 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
811 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
817 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
818 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
819 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
820 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
821 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
824 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
825 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
826 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
827 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
829 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
830 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
831 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
834 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
835 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
836 will probably be dropped in future versions.
837 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
838 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
839 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
840 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
841 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
842 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
843 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
846 NOTE: we will drop support for non-inboxed sites in the 0.9.x version
847 of Laconica. It's time to switch now!
852 Laconica 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored
853 international characters ("UTF-8"). This fix is not
854 backwards-compatible; installations from before 0.7.4 will show
855 non-ASCII characters of old notices incorrectly. This section explains
858 0. You can disable the new behaviour by setting the 'db''utf8' config
859 option to "false". You should only do this until you're ready to
860 convert your DB to the new format.
861 1. When you're ready to convert, you can run the fixup_utf8.php script
862 in the scripts/ subdirectory. If you've had the "new behaviour"
863 enabled (probably a good idea), you can give the ID of the first
864 "new" notice as a parameter, and only notices before that one will
865 be converted. Notices are converted in reverse chronological order,
866 so the most recent (and visible) ones will be converted first. The
867 script should work whether or not you have the 'db''utf8' config
869 2. When you're ready, set $config['db']['utf8'] to true, so that
870 new notices will be stored correctly.
872 Configuration options
873 =====================
875 The main configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
876 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
877 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
878 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
879 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
881 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
882 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
883 will be included in this order:
885 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
886 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
887 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
888 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
890 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
891 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
894 $config['section']['option'] = value;
896 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
902 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
904 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
905 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
906 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or ''
908 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
909 section above). Default is false.
910 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
911 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
913 logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on
914 hard errors. Default false.
915 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
916 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
917 don't need to use this.
918 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
919 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
920 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
922 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
924 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
925 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
926 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
927 except as the basis for your own.
928 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
929 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
930 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
931 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
932 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
933 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
934 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
935 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
936 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
937 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
938 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
939 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
940 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
941 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
942 was invited by an existing user.
943 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
944 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
945 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
946 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
948 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
949 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
950 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
952 logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
953 the logo in the theme, if any.
954 ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages.
955 Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never'
956 (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for
957 sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,
958 but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'.
959 sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like
960 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie
961 parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the
962 "normal" server can access the session cookie and
963 preferably other cookies as well.
964 shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140
965 characters will be sent to the user's chosen
967 design: a default design (colors and background) for the site.
968 Sub-items are: backgroundcolor, contentcolor, sidebarcolor,
969 textcolor, linkcolor, backgroundimage, disposition.
970 dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing
971 twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user
977 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
978 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
979 set are listed below for clarity.
981 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
982 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
983 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
984 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
985 'password' is the password, and etc.
986 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
987 to set this to point to the location of the
988 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
989 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
990 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
991 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
992 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
993 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
994 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
995 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
997 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
998 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
999 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
1000 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
1001 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
1002 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
1003 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
1004 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
1005 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
1006 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
1007 to include it in this array, too.
1008 utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default
1009 with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off
1010 until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database"
1016 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
1017 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
1019 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
1020 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
1021 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
1022 you can track log messages more easily.
1023 priority: level to log at. Currently ignored.
1024 facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only
1025 reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason
1031 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
1032 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
1033 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
1035 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
1036 subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for
1037 our hacked-together database queuing (no other server
1038 required) and "stomp" for a stomp server.
1039 stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like
1040 "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are
1041 possible; see your stomp server's documentation for
1043 queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically
1044 something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense.
1045 stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1047 stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1052 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
1053 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
1054 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
1055 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
1057 url: URL of the license, used for links.
1058 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
1059 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
1064 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
1065 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
1067 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
1068 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
1069 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
1070 them in an associative array.
1075 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
1077 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
1078 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
1079 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
1080 but you may want to add others if you have other software
1081 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
1082 don't want certain words used as usernames.
1083 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
1084 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
1085 interesting people, or whatever.
1090 For configuring avatar access.
1092 dir: Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into.
1093 Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if
1094 you change it, make sure to change path, too.
1095 path: Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory,
1096 but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will
1097 be included with the avatar server, too.
1098 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
1099 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
1100 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
1101 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
1102 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
1103 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
1104 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
1110 For configuring the public stream.
1112 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1113 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1114 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1115 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1116 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1117 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1118 autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus
1119 should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty.
1124 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1125 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real).
1126 Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server.
1127 dir: Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine
1128 whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme
1129 subdirectory of the install directory.
1130 path: Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the
1131 theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading,
1132 (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are
1133 reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null,
1134 which means to use the site path + '/theme'.
1139 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1141 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1142 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1143 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1144 shouldn't need to change.
1145 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1146 from 'user'@'server'.
1147 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1148 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1149 password: password for the user account.
1150 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1151 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1152 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1153 case with your server.
1154 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1155 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1156 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1157 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1159 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1160 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1161 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1162 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1163 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1164 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1169 For configuring invites.
1171 enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true.
1176 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1178 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1179 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1180 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1185 Settings for the "popular" section of the site.
1187 dropoff: Decay factor for popularity listing, in seconds.
1188 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1189 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1194 For daemon processes.
1196 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1197 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1198 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1199 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1200 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1201 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1203 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1204 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1209 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1210 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1212 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1213 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1214 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1215 base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long,
1216 funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The
1217 base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name
1218 (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if
1219 you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one
1220 Laconica site using your memcached server.
1221 port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.
1226 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1227 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1228 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1230 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1231 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1232 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1237 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1239 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1240 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1241 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1242 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1244 taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.
1251 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1252 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1253 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1258 For notice-posting throttles.
1260 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1261 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1262 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1263 from a user every hour.
1264 timespan: see 'count'.
1271 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1272 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1273 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1274 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1279 Options with new users.
1281 default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new
1282 users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.
1283 service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub
1284 if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe.
1285 welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new
1286 users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on
1287 busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for
1288 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.
1290 If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should
1291 be created before the configuration is updated.
1296 The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the
1297 local installation to a stats server on the laconi.ca Web site. This
1298 data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No
1299 identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data
1300 is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey
1301 helps Laconica developers take your needs into account when updating
1304 run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web'
1305 (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script),
1306 or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to
1307 schedule the script to run on a regular basis.
1308 frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics.
1309 Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is.
1310 Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits,
1312 reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to Laconica developers'
1313 report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may
1314 need to update this to another value. Note: if you
1315 don't want to report stats, it's much better to
1316 set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something
1322 The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure
1323 the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options:
1324 per file, per user (total), per user per month.
1326 We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type
1329 supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute,
1330 like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you
1331 setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to
1333 uploads: false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default).
1334 filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file'
1335 command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if
1336 you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the
1337 correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options.
1339 For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size
1340 in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf
1341 (if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't
1342 set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all).
1344 file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send
1345 any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment
1346 is smaller than file_quota.
1347 user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user
1348 can store any number of files as long as their total size does
1349 not exceed the user_quota.
1350 monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total
1351 size in bytes that a user can upload each month.
1352 dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go.
1353 Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which
1354 should be writeable by the Web user.
1355 server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files.
1356 Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using
1357 a virtual server here can speed up Web performance.
1358 path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to
1359 main path + '/file/'.
1360 filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be
1361 skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to
1367 Options for group functionality.
1369 maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set
1370 to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group.
1375 oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts).
1377 endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software.
1382 Some stuff for search.
1384 type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either
1385 be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient
1386 but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter
1387 will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large
1388 systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future,
1389 with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's).
1396 handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling
1397 code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false.
1398 Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server
1399 sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either.
1400 debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help
1401 with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false.
1406 Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines
1409 server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even
1410 virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is
1411 null; same as site server.
1412 dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/'
1413 subdir of install dir.
1414 path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note
1415 that you may need to change this if you change site-path too.
1420 A bi-direction bridge to Twitter (http://twitter.com/).
1422 enabled: default false. If true, will show user's Twitter friends'
1423 notices in their inbox and faves pages, only to the user. You
1424 must also run the twitterstatusfetcher.php script.
1429 Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can
1430 notify third-party servers of updates.
1432 notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty
1433 array (no notification).
1438 Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, Laconica has supported a simple but
1439 powerful plugin architecture. Important events in the code are named,
1440 like 'StartNoticeSave', and other software can register interest
1441 in those events. When the events happen, the other software is called
1442 and has a choice of accepting or rejecting the events.
1444 In the simplest case, you can add a function to config.php and use the
1445 Event::addHandler() function to hook an event:
1447 function AddGoogleLink($action)
1449 $action->menuItem('http://www.google.com/', _('Google'), _('Search engine'));
1453 Event::addHandler('EndPrimaryNav', 'AddGoogleLink');
1455 This adds a menu item to the end of the main navigation menu. You can
1456 see the list of existing events, and parameters that handlers must
1457 implement, in EVENTS.txt.
1459 The Plugin class in lib/plugin.php makes it easier to write more
1460 complex plugins. Sub-classes can just create methods named
1461 'onEventName', where 'EventName' is the name of the event (case
1462 matters!). These methods will be automatically registered as event
1463 handlers by the Plugin constructor (which you must call from your own
1464 class's constructor).
1466 Several example plugins are included in the plugins/ directory. You
1467 can enable a plugin with the following line in config.php:
1469 addPlugin('Example', array('param1' => 'value1',
1470 'param2' => 'value2'));
1472 This will look for and load files named 'ExamplePlugin.php' or
1473 'Example/ExamplePlugin.php' either in the plugins/ directory (for
1474 plugins that ship with Laconica) or in the local/ directory (for
1475 plugins you write yourself or that you get from somewhere else) or
1478 Plugins are documented in their own directories.
1483 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1484 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1485 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1487 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1488 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1489 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1490 conflicts in your code.
1492 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.4 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1493 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1494 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1499 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1500 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1501 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1504 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1505 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1506 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1507 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1508 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1510 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1511 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1512 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1513 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1514 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1515 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1516 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1521 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1522 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1523 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1525 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1527 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1532 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1534 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1535 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1536 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1537 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1542 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1543 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1544 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1545 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1546 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1551 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1552 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1553 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1555 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1556 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1557 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1558 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1559 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1560 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1571 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1575 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1576 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager)
1578 * Leslie Michael Orchard
1582 * Tobias Diekershoff
1591 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1592 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1593 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what