note betas are obsolete now

[quix0rs-gnu-social.git] / README

------
README
------

StatusNet 0.9.0 ("Stand")
4 Mar 2010

This is the README file for StatusNet, the Open Source microblogging
platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for
administrators. Information on using StatusNet can be found in the
"doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.

About
=====

StatusNet is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps
people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140
characters, by default) messages over the Web. Users can choose which
people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues'
status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter,
Google Buzz, or Yammer.

With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones,
instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed
desktop clients that support the Twitter API.

StatusNet supports an open standard called OStatus
<http://ostatus.org/> that lets users in different networks follow
each other. It enables a distributed social network spread all across
the Web.

StatusNet was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
Identi.ca <http://identi.ca/>. It is shared with you in hope that you
too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn
more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.1:

      http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd

StatusNet, Inc. <http://status.net/> also offers this software as a
Web service, requiring no installation on your part. The software run
on status.net is identical to the software available for download, so
you can move back and forth between a hosted version or a version
installed on your own servers.

License
=======

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public
License along with this program, in the file "COPYING".  If not, see
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
    *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
    you make modifications to the StatusNet source code on your server,
    you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code
    to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement
    of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your
    modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL STATUSNET*.

Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib'
directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under
liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's
particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory
for additional terms.

New this version
================

This is a major feature release since version 0.8.3, released Feb 1
2010. It is the final release version of 0.9.0, replacing any beta
versions.

Notable changes this version:

- Support for the new distributed status update standard OStatus
  <http://ostatus.org>, based on PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger,
  and Activity Streams.
- Support for location. Notices are (optionally) marked with lat-long
  information, and can be shown on a map.
- No fixed content size. Notice size is configurable, from 1 to
  unlimited number of characters. Default is still 140!
- An authorization framework, allowing different levels of users.
- A Web-based administration panel.
- A moderation system that lets site moderators sandbox, silence,
  or delete uncooperative users.
- A flag system that lets users flag profiles for moderator review.
- Support for OAuth <http://oauth.net> authentication in the Twitter
  API.
- A pluggable authentication system.
- An authentication plugin for LDAP servers.
- Many features that were core in 0.8.x are now plugins, such
  as OpenID, Twitter integration, Facebook integration
- A much-improved offline processing system
- In-browser "realtime" updates using a number of realtime
  servers (Meteor, Orbited, Cometd)
- A plugin to provide an interface optimized for mobile browsers
- Support for Facebook Connect
- Support for logging in with a Twitter account
- Vastly improved translation with additional languages and
  translation in plugins
- Support for all-SSL instances
- Core support for "repeats" (like Twitter's "retweets")
- Pluggable caching system, with plugins for Memcached,
  APC, XCache, and a disk-based cache
- Plugin to support RSSCloud
- A framework for adding advertisements to a public site,
  and plugins for Google AdSense and OpenX server
- Plugins to throttle excessive subscriptions and registrations.
- A plugin to blacklist particular URLs or nicknames.

There are also literally thousands of bugs fixed and minor features
added. A full changelog is available at http://status.net/wiki/StatusNet_0.9.0.

Under the covers, the software has a vastly improved plugin and
extension mechanism that makes writing powerful and flexible additions
to the core functionality much easier.

Prerequisites
=============

The following software packages are *required* for this software to
run correctly.

- PHP 5.2.3+. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
  versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
  in PHP 5.2 or above.
- MySQL 5.x. The StatusNet database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
  server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
  be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
  *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
  MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
- A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
  mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.

Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:

- Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
- XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
- MySQL. For accessing the database.
- GD. For scaling down avatar images.
- mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
- gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.

For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:

- Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
  information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
  performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
  server to store the data in.
- Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
  Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
- Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
  to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
  Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
- bcmath or gmp. For Salmon signatures (part of OStatus). Needed
  if you have OStatus configured.

You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.

External libraries
------------------

A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.

- DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
- Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
- OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
  to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
  implemented, and seems to be better supported.
  http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
- PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
  packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
  depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
  also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
  but won't work with OpenID.
  http://pear.php.net/package/DB
- OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
- markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
- PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
  http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
- PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
  http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
- PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
  http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
- XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
  library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
  as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
  the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
  version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
  version may render your StatusNet site unable to send or receive XMPP
  messages.
- Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
- PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
- PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
- PEAR Validate is an oEmbed dependency.
- PEAR Net_URL2 is an oEmbed dependency.
- Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options.
- libomb. a library for implementing OpenMicroBlogging 0.1, the
  predecessor to OStatus.
- HTTP_Request2, a library for making HTTP requests.

A design goal of StatusNet is that the basic Web functionality should
work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.

Installation
============

Installing the basic StatusNet Web component is relatively easy,
especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.

1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
   command like this will work:

           tar zxf statusnet-0.9.0.tar.gz

   ...which will make a statusnet-0.9.0 subdirectory in your current
   directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
   may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
   files to the server.)

2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
   directory. Usually something like this will work:

           mv statusnet-0.9.0 /var/www/statusnet

   This will make your StatusNet instance available in the statusnet path of
   your server, like "http://example.net/statusnet". "microblog" or
   "statusnet" might also be good path names. If you know how to
   configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
   "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.

3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.

          chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/

   On some systems, this will probably work:

           chgrp www-data /var/www/statusnet/
           chmod g+w /var/www/statusnet/

   If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
   that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
   a new group like "statusnet" and add the Web server's user to the group.

4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar, background, and
   file subdirectories writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do
   this is:

          chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/avatar
          chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/background
          chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/file

   You can also make the avatar, background, and file directories
   writeable by the Web server group, as noted above.

5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
   should work:

          mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create statusnet

   Note that StatusNet must have its own database; you can't share the
   database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
   though.

   (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
   a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
   service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)

6. Create a new database account that StatusNet will use to access the
   database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
   MySQL shell:

          GRANT ALL on statusnet.*
          TO 'statusnetuser'@'localhost'
          IDENTIFIED BY 'statusnetpassword';

   You should change 'statusnetuser' and 'statusnetpassword' to your preferred new
   username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
   this new user.

7. In a browser, navigate to the StatusNet install script; something like:

           http://yourserver.example.com/statusnet/install.php

   Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
   install program will configure your site and install the initial,
   almost-empty database.

8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
   and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
   has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
   edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
   if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
   URLs are stored in the database.

Fancy URLs
----------

By default, StatusNet will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
found at:

    http://example.org/statusnet/index.php/statusnet/fred

On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
look like this:

    http://example.org/statusnet/index.php?p=statusnet/fred

It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:

    http://example.org/statusnet/fred

These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
mod_rewrite enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
your server.

1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your StatusNet
   directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
   similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
   import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
   not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
   just leaving the .htaccess file.

2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
   to your StatusNet installation on your server. Typically this will
   be the path to your StatusNet directory relative to your Web root.

3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:

       $config['site']['fancy'] = true;

You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
like:

     http://example.net/statusnet/main/register

If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
the server first.

If it doesn't work, double-check that AllowOverride for the StatusNet
directory is 'All' in your Apache configuration file. This is usually
/etc/httpd.conf, /etc/apache/httpd.conf, or (on Debian and Ubuntu)
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default. See the Apache documentation for
.htaccess files for more details:

   http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html

Also, check that mod_rewrite is installed and enabled:

   http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Sphinx
------

To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you'll need to
enable the SphinxSearch plugin. Add to your config.php:

  addPlugin('SphinxSearch');
  $config['sphinx']['server'] = 'searchhost.local';

You also need to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for
php on the client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.

See plugins/SphinxSearch/README for more details and server setup.

SMS
---

StatusNet supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
configuration is essentially email configuration.

Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
converted to a notice and stored in the DB.

For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
(or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.

1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your StatusNet database. This will
   usually work:

           mysql -u "statusnetuser" --password="statusnetpassword" statusnet < db/carrier.sql

   This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
   that support email SMS gateways.

2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:

        chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php

   Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
   of a filter than a daemon.

2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:

      *: /path/to/statusnet/scripts/maildaemon.php

3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
   many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:

      newaliases

   You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
   take effect.

4. Set the following in your config.php file:

   $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';

At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
server, you'll need to have a full installation of StatusNet, a working
config.php, and access to the StatusNet database from the mail server.

XMPP
----

XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
well.

1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
   Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
   Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.

2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
   to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
   similar.  Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
   publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.

   StatusNet will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
   you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
   Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.

3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
   configuration section.

On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
got the XMPP daemon running.  See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.

NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
work around this bug in StatusNet; current recommendation is to move
off of amd64 to another server.

Public feed
-----------

You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.

To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:

      $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';

(Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
consider setting up queues and daemons.

Queues and daemons
------------------

Some activities that StatusNet needs to do, like broadcast OStatus, SMS,
and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
control. (Your other server will still need all the above
prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.

1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
   installed on whatever server you use.

2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install StatusNet
   somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
   .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
   to, or identical to, your Web server's version.

3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
   server!), set the following variable:

   $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;

   You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
   more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
   options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
   They're not created automatically.

4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh.

This will run the queue handlers:

* queuedaemon.php - polls for queued items for inbox processing and
  pushing out to OStatus, SMS, XMPP, etc.
* xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
  them as notices in the database; also pulls queued XMPP output from
  queuedaemon.php to push out to clients.

These two daemons will automatically restart in most cases of failure
including memory leaks (if a memory_limit is set), but may still die
or behave oddly if they lose connections to the XMPP or queue servers.

Additional daemons may be also started by this script for certain
plugins, such as the Twitter bridge.

It may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
to check their status and keep them running.

All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
daemons.

Since version 0.8.0, it's now possible to use a STOMP server instead of
our kind of hacky home-grown DB-based queue solution. This is strongly
recommended for best response time, especially when using XMPP.

See the "queues" config section below for how to configure to use STOMP.
As of this writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ 5.3.

Themes
------

There are two themes shipped with this version of StatusNet: "identica",
which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
basis for other sites.

As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.

You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
the config.php file. See below for details.

You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
following files:

display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
         Explorer 6.
ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
         Explorer 7.
logo.png: a logo image for the site.
default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
                            users who don't upload their own.
default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
                         listing on profile pages.

You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
your own directory.

NOTE: the HTML generated by StatusNet changed *radically* between
version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
modification to use the new output format.

Translation
-----------

Translations in StatusNet use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.

Contributions of translation information to StatusNet are very easy:
you can use the Web interface at TranslateWiki.net to add one
or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.

For info on helping with translations, see http://status.net/wiki/Translations

Backups
-------

There is no built-in system for doing backups in StatusNet. You can make
backups of a working StatusNet system by backing up the database and
the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
and to backup the Web directory, try tar.

Private
-------

The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
management, but host it on a public server.

Total privacy is not guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is
all-or-nothing for a site; you can't have some accounts or notices
private, and others public. The interaction of private sites
with OStatus is undefined.

Access to file attachments can also be restricted to logged-in users only.
1. Add a directory outside the web root where your file uploads will be
   stored. Usually a command like this will work:

           mkdir /var/www/statusnet-files

2. Make the file uploads directory writeable by the web server. An
   insecure way to do this is:

           chmod a+x /var/www/statusnet-files

3. Tell StatusNet to use this directory for file uploads. Add a line
   like this to your config.php:

           $config['attachments']['dir'] = '/var/www/statusnet-files';

Upgrading
=========

IMPORTANT NOTE: StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some
incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). For new
installations, it will now store non-ASCII characters correctly.
However, older installations will have the incorrect storage, and will
consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal
with this situation.

If you've been using StatusNet 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've
been tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably
want to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated
upgrade procedure in StatusNet 0.9.0. Try these step-by-step
instructions; read to the end first before trying them.

0. Download StatusNet and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
   doing a new install.
1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
   CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
   backup. You have been warned.
2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
   server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
   page.
3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
   xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
   If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
   daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
   this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
   maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
   final backup of the Web directory and database.
6. Move your StatusNet directory to a backup spot, like "statusnet.bak".
7. Unpack your StatusNet 0.9.0 tarball and move it to "statusnet" or
   wherever your code used to be.
8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
   directory to your new directory.
9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
   RewriteBase to use the correct path.
10. Rebuild the database. (You can safely skip this step and go to #12
    if you're upgrading from another 0.8.x version).

    NOTE: this step is destructive and cannot be
    reversed. YOU CAN EASILY DESTROY YOUR SITE WITH THIS STEP. Don't
    do it without a known-good backup!

    If your database is at version 0.8.0 or above, you can run a
    special upgrade script:

    mysql -u<rootuser> -p<rootpassword> <database> db/08to09.sql

    Otherwise, go to your StatusNet directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A
    BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:

    ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/statusnet.sql

    Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
    user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
    that's _not_ the user StatusNet runs as. Note that rebuilddb.sh drops
    your database and rebuilds it; if there is an error you have no
    database. Make sure you have a backup.
    For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
    which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
    script before running it.
11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
    the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
    bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.

If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
options below.

NOTE: the database definition file, laconica.ini, has been renamed to
statusnet.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
to update it.

Notice inboxes
--------------

Notice inboxes are now required. If you don't have inboxes enabled,
StatusNet will no longer run.

UTF-8 Database
--------------

StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored
international characters ("UTF-8"). This fix is not
backwards-compatible; installations from before 0.7.4 will show
non-ASCII characters of old notices incorrectly. This section explains
what to do.

0. You can disable the new behaviour by setting the 'db''utf8' config
   option to "false". You should only do this until you're ready to
   convert your DB to the new format.
1. When you're ready to convert, you can run the fixup_utf8.php script
   in the scripts/ subdirectory. If you've had the "new behaviour"
   enabled (probably a good idea), you can give the ID of the first
   "new" notice as a parameter, and only notices before that one will
   be converted. Notices are converted in reverse chronological order,
   so the most recent (and visible) ones will be converted first. The
   script should work whether or not you have the 'db''utf8' config
   option enabled.
2. When you're ready, set $config['db']['utf8'] to true, so that
   new notices will be stored correctly.

Configuration options
=====================

The main configuration file for StatusNet (excepting configurations for
dependency software) is config.php in your StatusNet directory. If you
edit any other file in the directory, like lib/default.php (where most
of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.

Starting with version 0.9.0, a Web based configuration panel has been
added to StatusNet. The preferred method for changing config options is
to use this panel.

A command-line script, setconfig.php, can be used to set individual
configuration options. It's in the scripts/ directory.

Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
/etc/statusnet/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
will be included in this order:

* /etc/statusnet/statusnet.php - server-wide config
* /etc/statusnet/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
* /etc/statusnet/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
* INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation

Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
line will be:

     $config['section']['option'] = value;

For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
option.

site
----

This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.

name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'statusnet' or ''
      (installed in root).
fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
       section above). Default is false.
logfile: full path to a file for StatusNet to save logging
         information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
         access to syslog.
logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on
          hard errors. Default false.
locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
             store all your locale data in one place, you probably
             don't need to use this.
language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
          Note that this is overridden if a user is logged in and has
          selected a different language. It is also overridden if the
          user is NOT logged in, but their browser requests a different
          langauge. Since pretty much everybody's browser requests a
          language, that means that changing this setting has little or
          no effect in practice.
languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
           only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
           or another language:
           "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
           support for German.
theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
       provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
       Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
       except as the basis for your own.
email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
       from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
           service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
           footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
           corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
          own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
        This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
        individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
        the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
            was invited by an existing user.
private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
         'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
         authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
         off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
         behaviour you want.
notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
        to put introductory information about your service, or info about
        upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
        be escaped.
logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
      the logo in the theme, if any.
ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages.
     Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never'
     (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for
     sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,
     but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'.
sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like
           'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie
           parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the
           "normal" server can access the session cookie and
           preferably other cookies as well.
shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140
                characters will be sent to the user's chosen
                shortening service.
dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing
           twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user
           or UI error.
textlimit: default max size for texts in the site. Defaults to 140.
           0 means no limit. Can be fine-tuned for notices, messages,
           profile bios and group descriptions.

db
--

This section is a reference to the configuration options for
DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
set are listed below for clarity.

database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your StatusNet database. This is
          in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
          where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
          really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
          'password' is the password, and etc.
ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'statusnet', you'll need
                to set this to point to the location of the
                statusnet.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
                should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
           type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
           libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
       value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
       just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
       password
quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
      database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
        'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
        use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
        than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
        You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
        and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
        requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
        to include it in this array, too.
utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default
      with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off
      until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database"
      above for details.
schemacheck: when to let plugins check the database schema to add
             tables or update them. Values can be 'runtime' (default)
             or 'script'. 'runtime' can be costly (plugins check the
             schema on every hit, adding potentially several db
             queries, some quite long), but not everyone knows how to
             run a script. If you can, set this to 'script' and run
             scripts/checkschema.php whenever you install or upgrade a
             plugin.

syslog
------

By default, StatusNet sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
(You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).

appname: The name that StatusNet uses to log messages. By default it's
         "statusnet", but if you have more than one installation on the
         server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
         you can track log messages more easily.
priority: level to log at. Currently ignored.
facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only
          reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason
          to change it.

queue
-----

You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.

enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for
           our hacked-together database queuing (no other server
           required) and "stomp" for a stomp server.
stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like
              "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are
              possible; see your stomp server's documentation for
              details.
queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically
                something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense. If running
                multiple instances on the same server, make sure that
                either this setting or $config['site']['nickname'] are
                unique for each site to keep them separate.

stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
                to null.
stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
                to null.

stomp_persistent: keep items across queue server restart, if enabled.

softlimit: an absolute or relative "soft memory limit"; daemons will
           restart themselves gracefully when they find they've hit
           this amount of memory usage. Defaults to 90% of PHP's global
           memory_limit setting.

inboxes: delivery of messages to receiver's inboxes can be delayed to
         queue time for best interactive performance on the sender.
         This may however be annoyingly slow when using the DB queues,
         so you can set this to false if it's causing trouble.

breakout: for stomp, individual queues are by default grouped up for
          best scalability. If some need to be run by separate daemons,
          etc they can be manually adjusted here.

          Default will share all queues for all sites within each group.
          Specify as <group>/<queue> or <group>/<queue>/<site>,
          using nickname identifier as site.

          'main/distrib' separate "distrib" queue covering all sites
          'xmpp/xmppout/mysite' separate "xmppout" queue covering just 'mysite'

max_retries: for stomp, drop messages after N failed attempts to process.
             Defaults to 10.

dead_letter_dir: for stomp, optional directory to dump data on failed
                 queue processing events after discarding them.

license
-------

The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.

type: one of 'cc' (for Creative Commons licenses), 'allrightsreserved'
      (default copyright), or 'private' (for private and confidential
      information).
owner: for 'allrightsreserved' or 'private', an assigned copyright
       holder (for example, an employer for a private site). If
       not specified, will be attributed to 'contributors'.
url: URL of the license, used for links.
title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
image: A button shown on each page for the license.

mail
----

This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php

backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
         'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
        them in an associative array.

nickname
--------

This is for configuring nicknames in the service.

blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
           registered. A default array exists for strings that are
           used by StatusNet (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
           but you may want to add others if you have other software
           installed in a subdirectory of StatusNet or if you just
           don't want certain words used as usernames.
featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
          Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
          interesting people, or whatever.

avatar
------

For configuring avatar access.

dir:    Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into.
        Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if
        you change it, make sure to change path, too.
path:   Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory,
        but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will
        be included with the avatar server, too.
server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
        root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
        writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
        the client to speed up page loading, either with another
        virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
        typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
        time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
        Defaults to null.
ssl:    Whether to access avatars using HTTPS. Defaults to null, meaning
        to guess based on site-wide SSL settings.

public
------

For configuring the public stream.

localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
           service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
           are shown in the public stream. Default true.
blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
           Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
           to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus
            should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty.

theme
-----

server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
        theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real).
        Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server.
dir:    Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine
        whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme
        subdirectory of the install directory.
path:   Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the
        theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading,
        (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are
        reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null,
        which means to use the site path + '/theme'.
ssl:    Whether to use SSL for theme elements. Default is null, which means
        guess based on site SSL settings.

javascript
----------

server: You can speed up page loading by pointing the
        theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real).
        Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server.
path:   Path part of Javascript URLs. Defaults to null,
        which means to use the site path + '/js/'.
ssl:    Whether to use SSL for JavaScript files. Default is null, which means
        guess based on site SSL settings.

xmpp
----

For configuring the XMPP sub-system.

enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
      shouldn't need to change.
user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
      from 'user'@'server'.
resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
          is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
password: password for the user account.
host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
      hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
      talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
      case with your server.
encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between StatusNet and the
            XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
            considerably better performance turning it off if you're
            connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
            protected network.
debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
       the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
       last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
       enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
        participating in third-party search and archiving services.

invite
------

For configuring invites.

enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true.

tag
---

Miscellaneous tagging stuff.

dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
         Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
         with it to try and get better results for your site.

popular
-------

Settings for the "popular" section of the site.

dropoff: Decay factor for popularity listing, in seconds.
         Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
         with it to try and get better results for your site.

daemon
------

For daemon processes.

piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
        (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
        stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
      to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
      you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
      not 1001.
group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
       to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.

memcached
---------

You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.

enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
        be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long,
      funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The
      base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name
      (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if
      you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one
      StatusNet site using your memcached server.
port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.

emailpost
---------

For post-by-email.

enabled: Whether to enable post-by-email. Defaults to true. You will
         also need to set up maildaemon.php.

sms
---

For SMS integration.

enabled: Whether to enable SMS integration. Defaults to true. Queues
         should also be enabled.

integration
-----------

A catch-all for integration with other systems.

taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.

inboxes
-------

For notice inboxes.

enabled: No longer used. If you set this to something other than true,
         StatusNet will no longer run.

throttle
--------

For notice-posting throttles.

enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
       is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
       from a user every hour.
timespan: see 'count'.

profile
-------

Profile management.

biolimit: max character length of bio; 0 means no limit; null means to use
          the site text limit default.

newuser
-------

Options with new users.

default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new
         users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.
         service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub
         if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe.
welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new
         users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on
         busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for
         'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.

If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should
be created before the configuration is updated.

snapshot
--------

The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the
local installation to a stats server on the status.net Web site. This
data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No
identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data
is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey
helps StatusNet developers take your needs into account when updating
the software.

run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web'
     (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script),
     or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to
     schedule the script to run on a regular basis.
frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics.
           Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is.
           Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits,
           on average.
reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to StatusNet developers'
           report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may
           need to update this to another value. Note: if you
           don't want to report stats, it's much better to
           set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something
           nonsensical.

attachments
-----------

The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure
the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options:
per file, per user (total), per user per month.

We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type
detection.

supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute,
           like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you
           setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to
           support.
uploads:   false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default).
filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file'
             command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if
             you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the
             correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options.

For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size
in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf
(if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't
set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all).

file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send
            any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment
            is smaller than file_quota.
user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user
            can store any number of files as long as their total size does
            not exceed the user_quota.
monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total
            size in bytes that a user can upload each month.
dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go.
     Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which
     should be writeable by the Web user.
server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files.
        Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using
        a virtual server here can speed up Web performance.
path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to
      main path + '/file/'.
ssl: whether to use HTTPS for file URLs. Defaults to null, meaning to
     guess based on other SSL settings.
filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be
             skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to
             '/usr/bin/file'.

group
-----

Options for group functionality.

maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set
            to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group.
desclimit: maximum number of characters to allow in group descriptions.
           null (default) means to use the site-wide text limits. 0
           means no limit.

oohembed
--------

oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts).

endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software.

search
------

Some stuff for search.

type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either
      be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient
      but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter
      will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large
      systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future,
      with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's).

sessions
--------

Session handling.

handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling
        code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false.
        Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server
        sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either.
debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help
       with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false.

background
----------

Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines
their use.

server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even
        virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is
        null; same as site server.
dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/'
     subdir of install dir.
path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note
      that you may need to change this if you change site-path too.
ssl: Whether or not to use HTTPS for background files. Defaults to
     null, meaning to guess from site-wide SSL settings.

ping
----

Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can
notify third-party servers of updates.

notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty
        array (no notification).

design
------

Default design (colors and background) for the site. Actual appearance
depends on the theme.  Null values mean to use the theme defaults.

backgroundcolor: Hex color of the site background.
contentcolor: Hex color of the content area background.
sidebarcolor: Hex color of the sidebar background.
textcolor: Hex color of all non-link text.
linkcolor: Hex color of all links.
backgroundimage: Image to use for the background.
disposition: Flags for whether or not to tile the background image.

notice
------

Configuration options specific to notices.

contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a notice.
              Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit.
              0 means no limit.

message
-------

Configuration options specific to messages.

contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a message.
              Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit.
              0 means no limit.

logincommand
------------

Configuration options for the login command.

disabled: whether to enable this command. If enabled, users who send
          the text 'login' to the site through any channel will
          receive a link to login to the site automatically in return.
          Possibly useful for users who primarily use an XMPP or SMS
          interface and can't be bothered to remember their site
          password. Note that the security implications of this are
          pretty serious and have not been thoroughly tested. You
          should enable it only after you've convinced yourself that
          it is safe. Default is 'false'.

singleuser
----------

If an installation has only one user, this can simplify a lot of the
interface. It also makes the user's profile the root URL.

enabled: Whether to run in "single user mode". Default false.
nickname: nickname of the single user.

robotstxt
---------

We put out a default robots.txt file to guide the processing of
Web crawlers. See http://www.robotstxt.org/ for more information
on the format of this file.

crawldelay: if non-empty, this value is provided as the Crawl-Delay:
            for the robots.txt file. see http://ur1.ca/l5a0
            for more information. Default is zero, no explicit delay.
disallow: Array of (virtual) directories to disallow. Default is 'main',
          'search', 'message', 'settings', 'admin'. Ignored when site
          is private, in which case the entire site ('/') is disallowed.

Plugins
=======

Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, StatusNet has supported a simple but
powerful plugin architecture. Important events in the code are named,
like 'StartNoticeSave', and other software can register interest
in those events. When the events happen, the other software is called
and has a choice of accepting or rejecting the events.

In the simplest case, you can add a function to config.php and use the
Event::addHandler() function to hook an event:

    function AddGoogleLink($action)
    {
        $action->menuItem('http://www.google.com/', _('Google'), _('Search engine'));
        return true;
    }

    Event::addHandler('EndPrimaryNav', 'AddGoogleLink');

This adds a menu item to the end of the main navigation menu. You can
see the list of existing events, and parameters that handlers must
implement, in EVENTS.txt.

The Plugin class in lib/plugin.php makes it easier to write more
complex plugins. Sub-classes can just create methods named
'onEventName', where 'EventName' is the name of the event (case
matters!). These methods will be automatically registered as event
handlers by the Plugin constructor (which you must call from your own
class's constructor).

Several example plugins are included in the plugins/ directory. You
can enable a plugin with the following line in config.php:

    addPlugin('Example', array('param1' => 'value1',
                               'param2' => 'value2'));

This will look for and load files named 'ExamplePlugin.php' or
'Example/ExamplePlugin.php' either in the plugins/ directory (for
plugins that ship with StatusNet) or in the local/ directory (for
plugins you write yourself or that you get from somewhere else) or
local/plugins/.

Plugins are documented in their own directories.

Troubleshooting
===============

The primary output for StatusNet is syslog, unless you configured a
separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
getting weird behaviour from StatusNet.

If you're tracking the unstable version of StatusNet in the git
repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
conflicts in your code.

If you upgraded to StatusNet 0.9.0 without reading the "Notice
inboxes" section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty,
read the "Notice inboxes" section above.

Myths
=====

These are some myths you may see on the Web about StatusNet.
Documentation from the core team about StatusNet has been pretty
sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
assumptions.

- "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
  extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
  emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
  Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
  not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.

- "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
  is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
  used by the running software. It was removed from the StatusNet
  distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
  configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
  and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
  persons may try to read it to get your passwords.

Unstable version
================

If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
development version of StatusNet. To get it, use the git version
control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:

        git clone git@gitorious.org:statusnet/mainline.git

This is the version of the software that runs on Identi.ca and the
status.net hosted service. Using it is a mixed bag. On the positive
side, it usually includes the latest security and bug fix patches. On
the downside, it may also include changes that require admin
intervention (like running a script or even raw SQL!) that may not be
documented yet. It may be a good idea to test this version before
installing it on your production machines.

To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!

Further information
===================

There are several ways to get more information about StatusNet.

* There is a mailing list for StatusNet developers and admins at
  http://mail.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
* The #statusnet IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
* The StatusNet wiki, http://status.net/wiki/
* The StatusNet blog, http://status.net/blog/
* The StatusNet status update, <http://status.status.net/> (!)

Feedback
========

* Microblogging messages to http://support.status.net/ are very welcome.
* The microblogging group http://identi.ca/group/statusnet is a good
  place to discuss the software.
* StatusNet has a bug tracker for any defects you may find, or ideas for
  making things better. http://status.net/bugs

Credits
=======

The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
StatusNet. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@status.net know
if anyone's been overlooked in error.

* Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, StatusNet, Inc.
* Zach Copley, StatusNet, Inc.
* Earle Martin, StatusNet, Inc.
* Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, StatusNet, Inc.
* Sarven Capadisli, StatusNet, Inc.
* Robin Millette, StatusNet, Inc.
* Ciaran Gultnieks
* Michael Landers
* Ori Avtalion
* Garret Buell
* Mike Cochrane
* Matthew Gregg
* Florian Biree
* Erik Stambaugh
* 'drry'
* Gina Haeussge
* Tryggvi Björgvinsson
* Adrian Lang
* Ori Avtalion
* Meitar Moscovitz
* Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
* Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager)
* Sean Murphy
* Leslie Michael Orchard
* Eric Helgeson
* Ken Sedgwick
* Brian Hendrickson
* Tobias Diekershoff
* Dan Moore
* Fil
* Jeff Mitchell
* Brenda Wallace
* Jeffery To
* Federico Marani
* Craig Andrews
* mEDI
* Brett Taylor
* Brigitte Schuster

Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed StatusNet,
told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what
it is today.