README
------
-Laconica 0.6.1
-6 October 2008
+Laconica 0.6.3 ("Gardening at Night")
+24 November 2008
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 feature improvement version from version 0.6.0
-(release 22 Sep 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.1 include:
-
-- Direct messages (DMs) and Favorites (faves) are now available
- through the Twitter-like API.
-- All of the Twitter commands (see http://ur1.ca/7ru) are available
- through SMS, IM, Web and API, although some are not functional (for
- features Laconica does not yet support)
-- 20 additional languages supported at various levels (some pretty
- basic).
-- Significant additional caching using memcached for most database
- queries. Using memcached can significantly speed up a Laconica
- instance with this version.
-- All required external libraries are now available in extlib/
- subdirectory.
-- Many bug fixes.
-- Continued but poorly-documented experimental support for Postgresql.
-
-NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
-laconica.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.
+This is a minor feature and security improvement version from version
+0.6.2 (release 13 Nov 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.3 include:
+
+- 'nudge' functionality to tell a user that they're missed.
+- Links to related RSS/Atom feeds on all pages.
+- Favor/disfavor icons changed to images.
+- Better checks to prevent remote subscribing to a local user, causing
+ "ghost profiles" (dupes in people search or subscriptions lists).
+- Twitter friend sync. Users who set up their Twitter accounts will
+ be automatically connected to other local users who have Twitter
+ accounts and who they're subscribed to on Twitter.
+- List view of subscriptions/subscribers.
+- Subscribe/unsubscribe button on subscriptions/subscribers list.
+- Optionally hide certain users from the public stream.
+- Give public area a few more tabs.
+- Add Featured users tab to public area.
+- Add Most favorited notices tab to public area.
+- Users can give themselves tags.
+- Users can tag their subscribers or subscriptions.
+- Users can send @-replies to tagged subsets of their contact list
+ using @#tag.
+- Subscribe/unsubscribe with Ajax form.
+- Post notice with Ajax form.
+- Script to optionally add notice inboxes for only some users.
+- Incremental caching of notice streams using memcached.
+- Use cached favorites info to avoid excess DB hits for faves.
+- Optionally use Sphinx Search for notice search.
+- Optionally use Sphinx Search for people search.
+- FOAF URL link on profile page.
+- HTML correction for repeated @id attributes in favorites forms.
Prerequisites
=============
- 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:
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.
+
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
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
1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
command like this will work:
- tar zxf laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
+ tar zxf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
- ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 subdirectory in your current
+ ...which will make a laconica-0.6.2 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-0.6.0 /var/www/mublog
+ mv laconica-0.6.2 /var/www/mublog
This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
+Sphinx
+------
+
+To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, 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.
+"pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
+to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
+
+You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
+search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
+
+On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
+the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
+indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
+every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
+to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
+
SMS
---
default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
daemons.
+Twitter Friends Syncing
+-----------------------
+
+As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
+to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
+attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
+Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
+previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
+
+Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
+to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
+look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
+syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
+users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
+
+Sample cron job:
+
+# Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
+0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
+
Sitemaps
--------
Backups
-------
-There is no builtin system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
+There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
backups of a working Laconica 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.
If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
-procedure in Laconica 0.6.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
+procedure in Laconica 0.6.2. 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
but you may want to add others if you have other software
installed in a subdirectory of Laconica 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
------
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.
theme
-----
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.
+sphinx
+------
+
+You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
+instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
+(http://sphinxsearch.com/).
+
+enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
+server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
+port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
+
integration
-----------
T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
conflicts in your code.
+If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.2 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
+section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
+"Notice inboxes" section above.
+
Myths
=====
* Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
+* Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
+* Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Ciaran Gultnieks
* Michael Landers
* Ori Avtalion
* Gina Haeussge
* Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
* Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
+* Tryggvi Björgvinsson
-Thanks also to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca,
-installed Laconi.ca, told their friends, and built the Open
-Microblogging network to what it is today.
+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,
+told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what
+it is today.
projects / quix0rs-gnu-social.git / blobdiff