README
------
-StatusNet 0.9.0 ("Stand") Release Candidate 2
-22 Dec 2009
+StatusNet 0.9.0 ("Stand") Beta 5
+1 Feb 2010
This is the README file for StatusNet (formerly Laconica), the Open
Source microblogging platform. It includes installation instructions,
================
This is a major feature release since version 0.8.2, released Nov 1 2009.
+It is also a security release since 0.9.0beta4 January 27 2010. Beta
+users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to deal with a security alert.
+
+http://status.net/wiki/Security_alert_0000002
+
Notable changes this version:
- Records of deleted notices are stored without the notice content.
- Add support for "repeats" (similar to Twitter's "retweets").
- Support for repeats in Twitter API.
- Better notification of direct messages.
+- New plugin to add "powered by StatusNet" to logo.
+- Returnto works for private sites.
+- Localisation updates, including new Persian translation.
+- CAS authentication plugin
+- Get rid of DB_DataObject native cache (big memory leaker)
+- setconfig.php script to set configuration variables
+- Blacklist plugin, to blacklist URLs and nicknames
+- Users can set flag whether they want to share location
+ both in notice form (for one notice) and profile settings
+ (any notice)
+- notice inboxes moved from normalized notice_inbox table to
+ denormalized inbox table
+- Automatic compression of Memcache
+- Memory caching pluginized
+- Memcache, XCache, APC and Diskcache plugins
+- A script to update user locations
+- cache empty query results
+- A sample plugin to show best plugin practices
+- CacheLog plugin to debug cache accesses
+- Require users to login to view attachments on private sites
+- Plugin to use Mollom spam detection service
+- Plugin for RSSCloud
+- Add an array of default plugins
+- A version action to give credit to contributors and plugin
+ developers
+- Daemon to read IMAP mailbox instead of using a mailbox script
+- Pass session information between SSL and non-SSL server
+ when SSL set to 'sometimes'
+- Major refactoring of queue handlers to manage very
+ large hosting site (like status.net)
+- SubscriptionThrottle plugin to prevent subscription spamming
+- Don't enqueue into plugin or SMS queues when disabled (breaks unqueuehandler if SMS queue isn't attached)
+- Improve name validation checks on local File references
+- fix local file include vulnerability in doc.php
+- Reusing fixed selector name for 'processing' in util.js
+- Removed hAtom pattern from registration page.
+- restructuring of User::registerNew() lost password munging
+- Add a script to clear the cache for a given key
+- buggy fetch for site owner
+- Added missing concat of </li> in Realtime response
+- Updated XHR binded events to work better in jQuery 1.4.1. Using .live() for event delegation instead of jQuery.data() and checking to see if an element was previously binded.
+- Updated jQuery Form Plugin from v2.17 to v2.36
+- Updated jQuery JavaScript Library from v1.3.2 to v1.4.1
+- move schema.type.php to typeschema.php like other files
+- Add Really Simple Discovery (RSD) support
+- Add a robots.txt URL to the site root
+- error clearing tags for profiles from memcached
+- on exceptions, stomp logs the error and reenqueues
+- add lat, lon, location and remove closing tag from geocode.php
+- Use passed-in lat long in geocode.php
+- better handling of null responses from geonames.org
+- Globalized form notice data geo values
+- Using jQuery chaining in FormNoticeXHR
+- Using form object instead of form_id and find(). Slightly faster and easier to read.
+- removed describeTable from base class, and fixed it up in pgsql
+- getTableDef() mostly working in postgres
+- move the schema DDL sql off into seperate files for each db we support
+- plugin to limit number of registered users
+- add hooks for user registration
+- live fast, die young in bash scripts
+- for single-user mode, retrieve either site owner or defined nickname
+- method to get the site owner
+- define a constant for the 'owner' role of a site
+- add simple cache getter/setter static functions to Memcached_DataObject
+- Adds notice author's name to @title in Realtime response
+- Hides .author from XHR response in showstream
+- Hides .author from XHR response in showstream
+- Fix more fatal errors in queue edge cases
+- Don't attempt to resend XMPP messages that can't be broadcast due to the profile being deleted.
+- Wrap each bit of distrib queue handler's saving operation in a try/catch; log exceptions but let everything else continue.
+- Log exceptions from queuedaemon.php if they're not already caught
+- Move sessions settings to its own panel
+- Fixes for status_network db object .ini and tag setter script
+- Add a script to set tags for sites
+- Adjust API authentication to also check for OAuth protocol params in the HTTP Authorization header, as defined in OAuth HTTP Authorization Scheme.
+- Last-chance distribution if enqueueing fails
+- Manual failover for stomp queues.
+- lost config in index.php made all traffic go to master
+- "Revert "move RW setup above user get in index.php so remember_me works""
+- Revert "move RW setup above user get in index.php so remember_me works"
+- move RW setup above user get in index.php so remember_me works
+- hide most DB_DataObject errors
+- always set up database_rw, regardless, so cached sessions work
+- update mysqltimestamps on insert and update
+- additional debugging data for Sessions
+- 'Sign in with Twitter' button img
+- Update to biz theme
+- Remove redundant session token field from form (was already being added by base class).
+- 'Sign in with Twitter' button img
+- Can now set $config['queue']['stomp_persistent'] = false; to explicitly disable persistence when we queue items
+- Showing processing indicator for form_repeat on submit instead of form
+- Removed avatar from repeat of username (matches noticelist)
+- Removed unused variable assignment for avatar URL and added missing fn
+- Don't preemptively close existing DB connections for web views (needed to keep # of conns from going insane on multi-site queue daemons, so just doing for CLI) May, or may not, help with mystery session problems
+- dropping the setcookie() call from common_ensure_session() since we're pretty sure it's unnecessary
+- append '/' on cookie path for now (may still need some refactoring)
+- set session cookie correctly
+- Fix for Mapstraction plugin's zoomed map links
+- debug log line for control channel sub
+- Move faceboookapp.js to the Facebook plugin
+- fix for fix for bad realtime JS load
+- default 24-hour expiry on Memcached objects where not specified.
Prerequisites
=============
needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
StatusNet dir, "." should suffice.
-This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
+This will run the queue handlers:
+* queuedaemon.php - polls for queued items for inbox processing and
+ pushing out to OMB, SMS, XMPP, etc.
* xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
- them as notices in the database.
-* jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
- registered users who should receive them.
-* publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
- public feed listeners.
-* ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
- recipients on foreign servers.
-* smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
- of registered users.
-* xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
- users.
-
-Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
-particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
-regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
-the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
-may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
+ 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.
+
+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
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. See the "queues"
config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this
-writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ (
+writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ.
Sitemaps
--------
compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
Contributions of translation information to StatusNet are very easy:
-you can use the Web interface at http://status.net/pootle/ to add one
+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
-------
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.
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
------
(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
----
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'.
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
----
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
=======
* 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,