upstream V3 development
https://www.gnusocial.rocks/v3
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------ README ------ 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 options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for administrators. Information on using Laconica can be found in the "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line. About ===== Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) 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, Jaiku and Plurk. 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. Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging <http://openmicroblogging.org/> that lets users on different Web sites or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web. Laconica 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 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 Laconica 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 LACONICA*. 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 0.7.4, 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 5.2.3+. 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 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. 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 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. 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 Laconica 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 laconica-0.8.0.tar.gz ...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-0.8.0 /var/www/mublog This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or "laconica" 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/mublog/ On some systems, this will probably work: chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/ chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/ 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 "mublog" 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/mublog/avatar chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/background chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/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 laconica Note that Laconica 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 Laconica will use to access the database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the MySQL shell: GRANT ALL on laconica.* TO 'lacuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword'; You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' 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 Laconica install script; something like: http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/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, Laconica 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/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll look like this: http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead: http://example.org/mublog/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_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in your server. 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica 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 Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will be the path to your Laconica 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/mublog/main/register If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart the server first. 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 --- Laconica 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 Laconica database. This will usually work: mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < 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/laconica/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 Laconica, a working config.php, and access to the Laconica 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. Laconica 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 Laconica; 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 Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, 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 Laconica 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. It needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the Laconica dir, "." should suffice. This will run eight (for now) queue handlers: * 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. * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user who have opted to set up Twitter bridging. * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users of the built-in Facebook application. 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', 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. 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 Bridge -------------- * OAuth As of 0.8.1, OAuth is used to to access protected resources on Twitter instead of HTTP Basic Auth. To use Twitter bridging you will need to register your instance of Laconica as an application on Twitter (http://twitter.com/apps), and update the following variables in your config.php with the consumer key and secret Twitter generates for you: $config['twitter']['consumer_key'] = 'YOURKEY'; $config['twitter']['consumer_secret'] = 'YOURSECRET'; When registering your application with Twitter set the type to "Browser" and your Callback URL to: http://example.org/mublog/twitter/authorization The default access type should be, "Read & Write". * Importing statuses from Twitter To allow your users to import their friends' Twitter statuses, you will need to enable the bidirectional Twitter bridge in config.php: $config['twitterbridge']['enabled'] = true; and run the TwitterStatusFetcher daemon (scripts/twitterstatusfetcher.php). Additionally, you will want to set the integration source variable, which will keep notices posted to Twitter via Laconica from looping back. The integration source should be set to the name of your application, exactly as you specified it on the settings page for your Laconica application on Twitter, e.g.: $config['integration']['source'] = 'YourApp'; * Twitter Friends Syncing 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. As of 0.8.0, this is no longer accomplished via a cron job. Instead you must run the SyncTwitterFriends daemon (scripts/synctwitterfreinds.php). Built-in Facebook Application ----------------------------- Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section above). Quick setup instructions*: Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/developers/ Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret. Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the key and secret, e.g.: # Config section for the built-in Facebook application $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY'; $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET'; In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app: - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/ - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/ - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/ (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the Facebook application you created.) Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab. In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method, "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width. Everything else can be left with default values. *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the Laconica wiki: http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication Sitemaps -------- Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your Laconica instance. 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be available through HTTP. 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server: php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file, like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir, typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>. You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the following to your robots.txt file: Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links to these resources. Themes ------ There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "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 Laconica 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 Laconica 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 Laconica are very easy: you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ 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. 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. Note that this is an experimental feature; 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. Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care. Upgrading ========= IMPORTANT NOTE: Laconica 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 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. 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 Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak". 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. 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. 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, 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'. 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 -------------- Laconica 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 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 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful. Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files will be included in this order: * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host * /etc/laconica/<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: $config['section']['option'] = value; For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and option. site ---- This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables. name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'. server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'. path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '' (installed in root). fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs section above). Default is false. logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging information to. You may want to use this if you don't have access to syslog. logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on hard errors. Default false. locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you store all your locale data in one place, you probably don't need to use this. language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English. languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd only change this if you wanted to disable support for one or another language: "unset($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. openidonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registrations and logins through OpenID. 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. 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 '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 '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. 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. syslog ------ By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility. (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above). appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's "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 ----- 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. 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 ------- 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. 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 Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme') 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 ------ 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. 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'. 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 Laconica 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. openid ------ For configuring OpenID. enabled: Whether to allow users to register and login using OpenID. 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 Laconica site using your memcached server. port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211. 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. 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. twitter ------- For Twitter integration enabled: Whether to enable Twitter integration. Defaults to true. Queues should also be enabled. 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. taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'. 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"'. 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. banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles. The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above, whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.) 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 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). 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. 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 =============== The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're getting weird behaviour from Laconica. If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica 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 Laconica 0.7.4 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 Laconica. Documentation from the core team about Laconica 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 Laconica 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 Laconica. To get it, use the git version control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so: git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts! Further information =================== There are several ways to get more information about Laconica. * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>. * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/ Feedback ======== * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome. * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find, or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/ * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very quickly, unless the question is really hard. Credits ======= The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know if anyone's been overlooked in error. * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc. * 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 * 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 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.