README
------
-Laconica 0.6.0
-22 September 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
================
-New features in version 0.6.0 include:
-
-* Invitations by email.
-* Users can mark messages as "favorites" (only Web, not API).
-* A bridge to push messages on the Laconica instance to an account on
- Twitter.
-* Direct private messages between users on a server (only Web, not API
- or IM or SMS).
-* Restructured off-line daemons.
+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
(See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
- stick with the basics at first.
+ stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
+ 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
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
---
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 Laconica; current recommendation is to move
+off of amd64 to another server.
+
Public feed
-----------
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. It
needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
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
--------
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 Laconica are very easy:
+you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ 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.
+
+Backups
+-------
+
+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.
+
Upgrading
=========
-If you've been using Laconica 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. Try these step-by-step instructions; read to the end
-first before trying them.
+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 0.6.2. 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
doing a new install.
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.
+precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
+options below.
+
+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.
+
+Notice inboxes
+--------------
+
+Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
+user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
+time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
+user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
+is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
+"Personal" tab.)
+
+Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
+the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
+future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
+or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
+
+Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
+are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
+empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
+problem.
+
+0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
+ you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
+ will probably be dropped in future versions.
+1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
+ In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
+ based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
+2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
+ fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
+ the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
+3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
+ 'true'.
Configuration options
=====================
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.
+
+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 Laconica database. This is
+ in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
+ where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (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 'laconica', you'll need
+ to set this to point to the location of the
+ laconica.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.
syslog
------
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
-----
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.
+
+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
+-----------
+
+A catch-all for integration with other systems.
+
+source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
+ to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
+ Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
+ that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
+ links to your site.
+
+inboxes
+-------
+
+For notice inboxes.
+
+enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
+ upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
+ 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
+
Troubleshooting
===============
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