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 - Many, many bug fixes.
124 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
127 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
128 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
130 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
131 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
132 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
133 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
134 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
135 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
136 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
138 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
140 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
141 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
142 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
143 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
144 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
145 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
147 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
149 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
150 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
151 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
152 server to store the data in.
153 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
154 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
155 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
156 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
157 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
159 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
160 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
161 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
162 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
167 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
168 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
169 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
170 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
171 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
172 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
174 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
175 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
176 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
177 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
178 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
179 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
180 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
181 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
182 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
183 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
184 but won't work with OpenID.
185 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
186 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
187 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
188 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
189 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
190 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
191 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
192 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
193 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
194 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
195 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
196 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
197 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
198 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
199 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
201 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
202 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
203 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
204 - PEAR Validate is an oEmbed dependency.
205 - PEAR Net_URL2 is an oEmbed dependency.
206 - Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options.
208 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
209 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
210 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
211 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
212 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
213 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
218 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
219 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
221 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
222 command like this will work:
224 tar zxf laconica-0.8.0.tar.gz
226 ...which will make a laconica-0.8.0 subdirectory in your current
227 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
228 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
229 files to the server.)
231 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
232 directory. Usually something like this will work:
234 mv laconica-0.8.0 /var/www/mublog
236 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
237 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
238 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
239 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
240 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
242 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
244 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
246 On some systems, this will probably work:
248 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
249 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
251 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
252 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
253 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
255 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
256 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
258 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
260 You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
261 group, as noted above.
263 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
266 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
268 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
269 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
272 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
273 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
274 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
276 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
277 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
280 GRANT ALL on laconica.*
281 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
282 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
284 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
285 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
288 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
290 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
292 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
293 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
294 almost-empty database.
296 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
297 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
298 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
299 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
300 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
301 URLs are stored in the database.
306 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
307 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
310 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
312 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
315 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
317 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
319 http://example.org/mublog/fred
321 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
322 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
323 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
326 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
327 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
328 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
329 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
330 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
331 just leaving the .htaccess file.
333 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
334 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
335 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
337 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
339 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
341 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
344 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
346 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
352 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
353 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
354 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
355 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
356 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
358 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
359 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
361 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
362 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
363 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
364 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
365 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
370 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
371 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
372 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
373 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
374 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
375 configuration is essentially email configuration.
377 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
378 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
379 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
380 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
382 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
383 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
385 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
388 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
390 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
391 that support email SMS gateways.
393 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
395 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
397 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
398 of a filter than a daemon.
400 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
402 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
404 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
405 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
409 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
412 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
414 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
416 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
417 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
418 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
419 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
424 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
425 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
426 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
427 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
430 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
431 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
432 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
434 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
435 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
436 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
437 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
439 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
440 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
441 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
443 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
444 configuration section.
446 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
447 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
448 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
449 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
450 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
451 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
453 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
454 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
455 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
456 off of amd64 to another server.
461 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
462 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
463 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
465 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
466 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
468 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
470 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
471 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
472 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
473 consider setting up queues and daemons.
478 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
479 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
480 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
481 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
482 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
483 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
484 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
486 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
487 installed on whatever server you use.
489 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
490 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
491 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
492 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
494 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
495 server!), set the following variable:
497 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
499 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
500 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
501 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
502 They're not created automatically.
504 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
505 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
506 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
508 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
510 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
511 them as notices in the database.
512 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
513 registered users who should receive them.
514 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
515 public feed listeners.
516 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
517 recipients on foreign servers.
518 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
520 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
522 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
523 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
524 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
525 of the built-in Facebook application.
527 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
528 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
529 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
530 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
531 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
532 to check their status and keep them running.
534 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
535 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
538 With version 0.8.0, it's now possible to use a STOMP server instead of
539 our kind of hacky home-grown DB-based queue solution. See the "queues"
540 config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this
541 writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ (
543 Twitter Friends Syncing
544 -----------------------
546 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
547 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
548 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
549 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
550 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
552 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
553 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
554 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
555 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
556 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
560 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
561 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
563 Built-in Facebook Application
564 -----------------------------
566 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
567 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
568 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
569 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
570 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
571 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
572 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
575 Quick setup instructions*:
577 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
579 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
581 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
582 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
583 key and secret, e.g.:
585 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
586 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
587 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
589 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
591 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
592 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
593 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
594 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
596 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
597 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
598 Facebook application you created.)
600 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
601 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
602 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
603 Everything else can be left with default values.
605 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
608 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
613 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
614 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
615 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
618 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
619 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
620 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
621 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
622 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
623 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
624 available through HTTP.
626 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
628 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
630 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
631 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
632 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
633 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
634 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
636 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
637 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
638 following to your robots.txt file:
640 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
642 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
643 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
644 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
650 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
651 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
652 basis for other sites.
654 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
655 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
656 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
657 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
659 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
660 the config.php file. See below for details.
662 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
663 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
666 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
667 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
669 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
671 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
672 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
673 users who don't upload their own.
674 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
675 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
676 listing on profile pages.
678 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
681 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
682 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
683 modification to use the new output format.
688 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
689 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
690 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
691 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
693 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
694 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
695 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
696 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
701 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
702 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
703 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
704 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
709 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
710 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
711 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
712 management, but host it on a public server.
714 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
715 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
716 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
717 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
718 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
719 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
720 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
721 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
726 IMPORTANT NOTE: Laconica 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some
727 incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). For new
728 installations, it will now store non-ASCII characters correctly.
729 However, older installations will have the incorrect storage, and will
730 consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal
733 If you've been using Laconica 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've
734 been tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably
735 want to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated
736 upgrade procedure in Laconica 0.8.0. Try these step-by-step
737 instructions; read to the end first before trying them.
739 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
741 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
742 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
743 backup. You have been warned.
744 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
745 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
747 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
748 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
749 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
750 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
751 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
752 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
753 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
754 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
755 final backup of the Web directory and database.
756 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
757 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.8.0 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
758 wherever your code used to be.
759 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
760 directory to your new directory.
761 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
762 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
763 10. Rebuild the database. NOTE: this step is destructive and cannot be
764 reversed. YOU CAN EASILY DESTROY YOUR SITE WITH THIS STEP. Don't
765 do it without a known-good backup!
767 If your database is at version 0.7.4, you can run a special upgrade
770 mysql -u<rootuser> -p<rootpassword> <database> db/074to080.sql
772 Otherwise, go to your Laconica directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A
773 BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
775 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
777 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
778 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
779 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as. Note that rebuilddb.sh drops
780 your database and rebuilds it; if there is an error you have no
781 database. Make sure you have a backup.
782 For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
783 which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
784 script before running it.
785 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
786 the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
787 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
788 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
789 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
791 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
792 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
793 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
796 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
797 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
798 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
804 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
805 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
806 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
807 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
808 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
811 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
812 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
813 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
814 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
816 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
817 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
818 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
821 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
822 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
823 will probably be dropped in future versions.
824 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
825 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
826 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
827 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
828 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
829 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
830 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
833 NOTE: we will drop support for non-inboxed sites in the 0.9.x version
834 of Laconica. It's time to switch now!
839 Laconica 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored
840 international characters ("UTF-8"). This fix is not
841 backwards-compatible; installations from before 0.7.4 will show
842 non-ASCII characters of old notices incorrectly. This section explains
845 0. You can disable the new behaviour by setting the 'db''utf8' config
846 option to "false". You should only do this until you're ready to
847 convert your DB to the new format.
848 1. When you're ready to convert, you can run the fixup_utf8.php script
849 in the scripts/ subdirectory. If you've had the "new behaviour"
850 enabled (probably a good idea), you can give the ID of the first
851 "new" notice as a parameter, and only notices before that one will
852 be converted. Notices are converted in reverse chronological order,
853 so the most recent (and visible) ones will be converted first. The
854 script should work whether or not you have the 'db''utf8' config
856 2. When you're ready, set $config['db']['utf8'] to true, so that
857 new notices will be stored correctly.
859 Configuration options
860 =====================
862 The main configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
863 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
864 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
865 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
866 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
868 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
869 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
870 will be included in this order:
872 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
873 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
874 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
875 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
877 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
878 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
881 $config['section']['option'] = value;
883 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
889 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
891 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
892 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
893 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or ''
895 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
896 section above). Default is false.
897 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
898 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
900 logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on
901 hard errors. Default false.
902 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
903 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
904 don't need to use this.
905 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
906 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
907 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
909 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
911 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
912 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
913 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
914 except as the basis for your own.
915 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
916 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
917 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
918 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
919 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
920 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
921 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
922 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
923 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
924 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
925 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
926 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
927 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
928 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
929 was invited by an existing user.
930 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
931 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
932 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
933 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
935 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
936 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
937 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
939 logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
940 the logo in the theme, if any.
941 ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages.
942 Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never'
943 (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for
944 sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,
945 but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'.
946 sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like
947 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie
948 parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the
949 "normal" server can access the session cookie and
950 preferably other cookies as well.
951 shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140
952 characters will be sent to the user's chosen
954 design: a default design (colors and background) for the site.
955 Sub-items are: backgroundcolor, contentcolor, sidebarcolor,
956 textcolor, linkcolor, backgroundimage, disposition.
957 dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing
958 twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user
964 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
965 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
966 set are listed below for clarity.
968 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
969 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
970 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
971 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
972 'password' is the password, and etc.
973 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
974 to set this to point to the location of the
975 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
976 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
977 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
978 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
979 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
980 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
981 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
982 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
984 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
985 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
986 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
987 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
988 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
989 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
990 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
991 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
992 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
993 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
994 to include it in this array, too.
995 utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default
996 with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off
997 until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database"
1003 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
1004 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
1006 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
1007 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
1008 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
1009 you can track log messages more easily.
1010 priority: level to log at. Currently ignored.
1011 facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only
1012 reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason
1018 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
1019 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
1020 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
1022 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
1023 subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for
1024 our hacked-together database queuing (no other server
1025 required) and "stomp" for a stomp server.
1026 stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like
1027 "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are
1028 possible; see your stomp server's documentation for
1030 queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically
1031 something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense.
1032 stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1034 stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1039 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
1040 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
1041 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
1042 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
1044 url: URL of the license, used for links.
1045 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
1046 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
1051 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
1052 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
1054 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
1055 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
1056 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
1057 them in an associative array.
1062 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
1064 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
1065 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
1066 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
1067 but you may want to add others if you have other software
1068 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
1069 don't want certain words used as usernames.
1070 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
1071 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
1072 interesting people, or whatever.
1077 For configuring avatar access.
1079 dir: Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into.
1080 Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if
1081 you change it, make sure to change path, too.
1082 path: Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory,
1083 but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will
1084 be included with the avatar server, too.
1085 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
1086 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
1087 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
1088 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
1089 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
1090 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
1091 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
1097 For configuring the public stream.
1099 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1100 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1101 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1102 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1103 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1104 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1105 autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus
1106 should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty.
1111 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1112 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real).
1113 Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server.
1114 dir: Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine
1115 whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme
1116 subdirectory of the install directory.
1117 path: Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the
1118 theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading,
1119 (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are
1120 reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null,
1121 which means to use the site path + '/theme'.
1126 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1128 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1129 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1130 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1131 shouldn't need to change.
1132 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1133 from 'user'@'server'.
1134 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1135 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1136 password: password for the user account.
1137 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1138 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1139 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1140 case with your server.
1141 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1142 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1143 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1144 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1146 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1147 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1148 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1149 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1150 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1151 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1156 For configuring invites.
1158 enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true.
1163 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1165 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1166 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1167 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1172 Settings for the "popular" section of the site.
1174 dropoff: Decay factor for popularity listing, in seconds.
1175 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1176 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1181 For daemon processes.
1183 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1184 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1185 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1186 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1187 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1188 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1190 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1191 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1196 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1197 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1199 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1200 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1201 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1202 base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long,
1203 funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The
1204 base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name
1205 (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if
1206 you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one
1207 Laconica site using your memcached server.
1208 port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.
1213 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1214 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1215 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1217 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1218 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1219 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1224 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1226 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1227 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1228 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1229 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1231 taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.
1238 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1239 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1240 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1245 For notice-posting throttles.
1247 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1248 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1249 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1250 from a user every hour.
1251 timespan: see 'count'.
1258 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1259 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1260 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1261 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1266 Options with new users.
1268 default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new
1269 users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.
1270 service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub
1271 if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe.
1272 welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new
1273 users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on
1274 busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for
1275 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.
1277 If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should
1278 be created before the configuration is updated.
1283 The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the
1284 local installation to a stats server on the laconi.ca Web site. This
1285 data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No
1286 identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data
1287 is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey
1288 helps Laconica developers take your needs into account when updating
1291 run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web'
1292 (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script),
1293 or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to
1294 schedule the script to run on a regular basis.
1295 frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics.
1296 Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is.
1297 Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits,
1299 reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to Laconica developers'
1300 report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may
1301 need to update this to another value. Note: if you
1302 don't want to report stats, it's much better to
1303 set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something
1309 The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure
1310 the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options:
1311 per file, per user (total), per user per month.
1313 We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type
1316 supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute,
1317 like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you
1318 setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to
1320 uploads: false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default).
1321 filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file'
1322 command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if
1323 you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the
1324 correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options.
1326 For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size
1327 in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf
1328 (if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't
1329 set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all).
1331 file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send
1332 any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment
1333 is smaller than file_quota.
1334 user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user
1335 can store any number of files as long as their total size does
1336 not exceed the user_quota.
1337 monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total
1338 size in bytes that a user can upload each month.
1339 dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go.
1340 Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which
1341 should be writeable by the Web user.
1342 server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files.
1343 Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using
1344 a virtual server here can speed up Web performance.
1345 path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to
1346 main path + '/file/'.
1347 filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be
1348 skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to
1354 Options for group functionality.
1356 maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set
1357 to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group.
1362 oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts).
1364 endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software.
1369 Some stuff for search.
1371 type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either
1372 be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient
1373 but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter
1374 will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large
1375 systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future,
1376 with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's).
1383 handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling
1384 code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false.
1385 Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server
1386 sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either.
1387 debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help
1388 with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false.
1393 Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines
1396 server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even
1397 virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is
1398 null; same as site server.
1399 dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/'
1400 subdir of install dir.
1401 path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note
1402 that you may need to change this if you change site-path too.
1407 A bi-direction bridge to Twitter (http://twitter.com/).
1409 enabled: default false. If true, will show user's Twitter friends'
1410 notices in their inbox and faves pages, only to the user. You
1411 must also run the twitterstatusfetcher.php script.
1416 Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can
1417 notify third-party servers of updates.
1419 notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty
1420 array (no notification).
1425 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1426 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1427 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1429 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1430 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1431 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1432 conflicts in your code.
1434 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.4 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1435 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1436 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1441 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1442 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1443 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1446 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1447 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1448 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1449 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1450 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1452 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1453 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1454 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1455 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1456 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1457 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1458 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1463 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1464 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1465 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1467 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1469 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1474 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1476 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1477 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1478 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1479 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1484 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1485 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1486 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1487 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1488 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1493 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1494 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1495 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1497 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1498 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1499 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1500 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1501 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1502 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1513 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1517 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1518 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager)
1520 * Leslie Michael Orchard
1524 * Tobias Diekershoff
1533 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1534 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1535 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what