README
------
-Laconica 0.7.4 ("Can't Get There From Here")
-29 May 2009
+Laconica 0.8.0 ("Shiny Happy People")
+15 July 2009
This is the README file for Laconica, the Open Source microblogging
platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
New this version
================
-This is a minor bug-fix and feature release since version 0.7.3,
-released Apr 4 2009. Notable changes this version:
-
-- Improved handling of UTF-8 characters. The new code is *not* backwards
- compatible by default; see "Upgrading" below for instructions on
- converting existing databases to the correct character set.
-- Unroll joins for large queries. This greatly enhanced database
- performance -- up to 50x for some queries -- at the expense of making
- an extra DB hit for some queries.
-- Added an optional plugin to use WikiHashtags
- (http://hashtags.wikia.com/) for the sidebar on hashtag pages.
-- Optimized Twitter friend synchronization.
-- Better error handling for Ajax posting of notices, including
- HTTP errors and timeouts.
-- Experimental Comet plugin -- supports the cometd and the Bayeux
- protocol. Using this plugin, you can show "real time" updates on the
- public and tag pages. However, server configuration is complex.
-- If queues are enabled, update inboxes and memcached off-line. Speeds
- up posting considerably.
-- Correctly shorten links posted through XMPP.
-- <link> elements for pagination, supported by some browsers like Opera.
-- Corrected date format in search API.
-- Made the public XRDS file work correctly.
+This is a major feature release since version 0.7.4, released May 31
+2009. Notable changes this version:
+
+- Support for a hosted service (status network). Multiple sites can
+ share the same codebase but use different databases.
+- OEmbed. Links to pages that support OEmbed (http://www.oembed.com/)
+ become popup links, and the media are shown in a special lightbox.
+- File attachments. Users can attach files of the size and type approved
+ by an administrator, and a shortened link will be included in the
+ notice.
+- Related notices are organized into conversations, with each reply a
+ branch in a tree. Conversations have pages and are linked to from each
+ notice in the conversation.
+- User designs. Users can specify colours and backgrounds
+ for their profile pages and other "personal" pages.
+- Group designs. Group administrators can specify similar designs for
+ group profiles and related pages.
+- Site designs. Site authors can specify a design (background and
+ colors) for the site.
+- New themes. Five new themes are added to the base release; these show
+ off the flexibility of Laconica's theming system.
+- Statistics. Public sites will periodically send usage statistics,
+ configuration options, and dependency information to Laconica dev site.
+ This will help us understand how the software is used and plan future
+ versions of the software.
+- Additional hooks. The hooks and plugins system introduced in 0.7.x was
+ expanded with additional points of access.
+- Facebook Connect. A new plugin allows logging in with Facebook Connect
+ (http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php).
+- A session handler. A new optional session handler class to manage PHP
+ sessions reliably and quickly for large sites.
+- STOMP queuing. Queue management for offline daemons has been
+ abstracted with three concrete instances. A new interface that should
+ work with STOMP servers like ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ is available, which
+ should make things scale better.
+- Group block. Group admins can block users from joining or posting to
+ a group.
+- Group aliases. Groups can be referred to with aliases, additional
+ names. For example, "!yul" and "!montreal" can be the same group.
+- Bidirectional Twitter bridge. Users can read the tweets their Twitter
+ friends post on Twitter.
+- Adaptation of WordPress.com Terms of Service (http://en.wordpress.com/tos/)
+ as default TOS for Laconica sites.
+- Better command-line handling for scripts, including standard options
+ and ability to set hostname and path from the command line.
+- An experimental plugin to use Meteor (http://www.meteorserver.org/)
+ for "real-time" updates.
+- A new framework for "real-time" updates, making it easier to develop
+ plugins for different browser-based update modes.
+- RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds for groups.
+- RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds for tags.
+- Attachments can be sent by email.
+- Attachments are encoded as enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom.
+- Notices with attachments display in Facebook as media inline.
+
+- Many, many bug fixes.
Prerequisites
=============
The following software packages are *required* for this software to
run correctly.
-- PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
+- 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 Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
version may render your Laconica 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.
A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
command like this will work:
- tar zxf laconica-0.7.4.tar.gz
+ tar zxf laconica-0.8.0.tar.gz
- ...which will make a laconica-0.7.4 subdirectory in your current
+ ...which will make a laconica-0.8.0 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 laconica-0.7.4 /var/www/mublog
+ mv laconica-0.8.0 /var/www/mublog
This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
-4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
- writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
+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/mublog/avatar
+ chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/background
+ chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/file
- You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
- group, as noted above.
+ 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:
default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
daemons.
+With 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. See the "queues"
+config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this
+writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ (
+
Twitter Friends Syncing
-----------------------
consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal
with this situation.
-If you've been using Laconica 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 Laconica 0.7.4. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
-to the end first before trying them.
+If you've been using Laconica 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 Laconica 0.8.0. Try these step-by-step
+instructions; read to the end first before trying them.
0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
doing a new install.
5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
final backup of the Web directory and database.
6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
-7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
+7. Unpack your Laconica 0.8.0 tarball and move it to "mublog" 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. For MySQL, go to your Laconica directory and
- run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
+10. Rebuild the database. 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 0.7.4, you can run a special upgrade
+ script:
+
+ mysql -u<rootuser> -p<rootpassword> <database> db/074to080.sql
+
+ Otherwise, go to your Laconica directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A
+ BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.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 Laconica runs as.
+ that's _not_ the user Laconica 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.
3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
'true'.
+NOTE: we will drop support for non-inboxed sites in the 0.9.x version
+of Laconica. It's time to switch now!
+
UTF-8 Database
--------------
Configuration options
=====================
-The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
+The main configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
logfile: full path to a file for Laconica 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.
to put introductory information about your service, or info about
upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
be escaped.
-dupelimit: Time in which it's not OK for the same person to post the
- same notice; default = 60 seconds.
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.
shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140
characters will be sent to the user's chosen
shortening service.
+design: a default design (colors and background) for the site.
+ Sub-items are: backgroundcolor, contentcolor, sidebarcolor,
+ textcolor, linkcolor, backgroundimage, disposition.
+dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing
+ twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user
+ or UI error.
db
--
"laconica", 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
-----
'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.
+stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
+ to null.
+stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
+ to null.
license
-------
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
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). The
- theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
- subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
+ 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'.
xmpp
----
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
---
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
------
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
+ Laconica site using your memcached server.
+port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.
sphinx
------
Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
links to your site.
+taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.
inboxes
-------
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 laconi.ca 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 Laconica 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 Laconica 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/'.
+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.
+
+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.
+
+twitterbridge
+-------------
+
+A bi-direction bridge to Twitter (http://twitter.com/).
+
+enabled: default false. If true, will show user's Twitter friends'
+ notices in their inbox and faves pages, only to the user. You
+ must also run the twitterstatusfetcher.php script.
+
+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).
+
+Plugins
+=======
+
+Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, Laconica 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 Laconica) 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
===============
* Ori Avtalion
* Meitar Moscovitz
* Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
-* Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
+* Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager)
* Sean Murphy
* Leslie Michael Orchard
* Eric Helgeson
* Tobias Diekershoff
* Dan Moore
* Fil
+* Jeff Mitchell
+* Brenda Wallace
+* Jeffery To
+* Federico Marani
+* Craig Andrews
Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
projects / quix0rs-gnu-social.git / blobdiff