Activity Stream Documentation

Authors

Justin Quick <justquick@gmail.com>

Version

0.1

Django Activity Stream is a way of creating activities generated by the actions on your site. Action events are categorized by three main components.

• Actor. The object that performed the action.
• Verb. The verb phrase of the action performed.
• Target. (Optional) The object that the verb is enacted on.

Actor and Target are GenericForeignKeys to any arbitrary Django object. An action is a description of an action that was performed (Verb) at some instant in time by some Acor, with some optional Target.

Nomenclature of this specification is based on the Atom Activity Extension

Install

Add actstream to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'actstream',
    ...
)

Add the activity urls:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    ('^activity/', include('actstream.urls')),
    ...
)

Generating Actions

Generating actions is probably best done in a separate signal:

from django.db.models.signals import pre_save
from actstream import action
from myapp.models import MyModel

def my_handler(sender, **kwargs):
    action.save(sender, verb='was saved')

pre_save.connect(my_handler, sender=MyModel)   

To generate an action anywhere in your code, simply import the action signal and send it with your actor, verb, and target:

from actstream import action

action.send(request.user, verb='reached level 10')
action.send(request.user, verb='joined', target=group) 

Following Actors

Generating the link between a User and any particular Actor is as easy as calling a function:

from actstream import follow

follow(request.user, group)

You can also just make a GET request to the actstream_follow view:

GET /activity/follow/<content_type_id>/<object_id>/?next=/blog/

Then the current logged in user will follow the actor defined by content_type_id & object_id. Optional next parameter is URL to redirect to.

Activity Feeds

Listings of activities are available for several points of view. All are sorted by -timestamp:

from actstream import actor_stream, user_stream, model_stream

Activities by actor:

actor_stream(actor)

Activities by Django Model:

model_stream(model)

Activities from actors that a particular user is folowing:

user_stream(user)