saahov / mt-plugin-action-streams

Manages authors' accounts and actions from sites around the web

Action Streams plugin for Movable Type 5

Authors

Mark Paschal, Akira Sawada, Fumiaki Yoshimatsu, Bryan Tighe, Brad Choate, Alex Bain

Copyright

The following copyright notice applies to all the files provided in this distribution, including binary files, unless explicitly noted otherwise.

Copyright 2009-2010 Six Apart, Ltd.

License

This library is free software released under the GPL.

Overview

Action Streams for Movable Type collects your action on third party web sites into your Movable Type web site. Using it, you can aggregate those actions for your reference, promote specific items to blog posts, and stream the whole set to your friends and readers. Action Streams are a powerful part of your web profile.

The plugin adds the ability for your Movable Type authors to list their accounts on third party web services. A periodic task then automatically imports your authors' activity on those services using XML feeds (where provided) and scraping HTML pages (where necessary). Your authors can then publish their action streams completely under their control: the provided template tags make it possible to display authors' accounts and actions on any page powered by Movable Type. The example templates and the provided template set also use the XFN and hAtom microformats and provide web feeds to integrate with tools your readers may be using.

Prerequisites

This plugin works both with Movable Type 5 and Movable Type 4.

• Movable Type 5.02 or higher
• Movable Type 4.2 or higher
• Scheduled task or cron job to execute the Periodic Tasks script (see below)

The Action Streams plugin ships with all of the external libraries you should need to run it.

Installation

1. Configure a cronjob (see below) for the script run-periodic-tasks.
2. Unpack the ActionStreams archive.
3. Copy the contents of ActionStreams/extlib into /path/to/mt/extlib/
4. Copy the contents of ActionStreams/mt-static into /path/to/mt/mt-static/
5. Copy the contents of ActionStreams/plugins into /path/to/mt/plugins/
6. Navigate to your profile, and click on "Other Profiles."
7. Build a list of your accounts from which to display and stream actions.
8. Edit your stylesheet to include needed CSS. (see STYLES below)
9. Edit your templates to display your other profiles and your Action Stream. (See the Template Author Guide in the doc/ folder.) A template set is also provided for convenience.
10. Edit the plugin's settings to enable automatically rebuilding your blog as new actions are imported. This setting is under each of your blog's plugin settings.

Cron Job

Action Streams uses Movable Type's scheduled task system to collect your action data from remote services. To run scheduled tasks, configure a cron job to run MT's tools/run-periodic-tasks script periodically.

Add the following lines to your crontab to execute the script every 10 minutes:

# Movable Type scheduled tasks
*/10 * * * * cd /path/to/mt; perl ./tools/run-periodic-tasks

Styles

To add icons to your Action Streams and other basic styling, add the following line to the top of your main stylesheet (normally styles.css).

@import url(<MT:StaticWebPath>plugins/ActionStreams/css/action-streams.css);

The classes used in the template code examples use the same classes as the default templates and thus they work well with the default themes.

Template Code

See the Template Author Guide in the doc/ folder for help with Action Streams' template tags.

Changes

2.3.1 (26 Oct 2010)

• Minor cleanup, license update, move to Movable Type organization in GitHub.

2.3 (26 May 2010)

• Support Movable Type 5.02.

2.2

• Forked from the original repository.
• Improved Delicious stream.
• Fixed error when rebuilding blogs with deactivated templates.
• Support for "not" operator in mt:ActionStreams "service" and "stream"
• tag attributes when used individually.
• Quieter operation when used with Log4MT.
• Fixed bug that prevented use of methods other than get() with the HTTP caching system.

2.1 (17 March 2009)

• Localized into several pleasing world languages. (Thanks, Six Apart Motion Team!)
• Wrote documentation (see plugin's doc/ directory or web site).
• Provided editing of external profiles that have already been added.
• Added "Update Now" button to profiles list.
• Hotlinking of Twitter and Identi.ca tweets in default rendering.
• Support for conditional HTTP requests when collecting actions.
• Provided filtering of the "Action Streams" listing in the app.
• Added StreamActionRollup tag for "rolling up" similar actions.
• Bundled the "Recent Actions" blog dashboard widget. (Thanks, Bryan!)
• Added support for RSS feeds in the Website stream.
• Provided code to make easy "rss" recipes from RSS feeds.
• Improved template set (incl. fixes for MT 4.2 support).
• Switched to asynchronous job processing for action collecting.
• Made installation easier (less dependent on Web::Scraper, moved extlib into plugin as per MT 4.2 capability, removed Iwtst plugin).
• Added many new profiles and streams!

1.0 (30 January 2008)

• Initial release.

Credits

Thanks to Bryan Tighe, Brad Choate, and Alex Bain for their contributions of various features and stream recipes.

This distribution contains icons from Silk, an icon set by Mark James, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/