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Optional modules

Askbot supports a number of optional modules, enabling certain features, not available in askbot by default.

Sphinx search

Askbot supports Sphinx search - and at this point only for MySQL. Tested with sphinx 0.9.8. May be a little outdated, please give your feedback if that is the case.

To enable:

  • install sphinx search package
  • if necessary to support Chinese language, instead take sphinx for Chinese
  • prepare configuration file by running command python manage.py get_askbot_sphinx_config > sphinx.conf
  • if necessary, modify the .conf file (may be needed for language other than English
  • place the sphinx.conf file to an appropriate location, like /etc/sphinx/

Install django-sphinx python module (and follow all instructions)

pip install django-sphinx

In settings.py add:

SPHINX_API_VERSION = 0x113 #according to django sphinx doc
USE_SPHINX_SEARCH = True
ASKBOT_SPHINX_SEARCH_INDEX = 'askbot'

Note

Value of SPHINX_API_VERSION may depend on the version of python sphinx api installed with the django-sphinx application, please refer to the django-sphinx documentation.

Initialize the sphinx index (may need to log in as root):

indexer askbot --config /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf

Start the sphinx search daemon:

/usr/local/bin/searchd --config /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf &

Also, add the line above to the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local or equivalent to start the daemon when the server reboots.

Set up a periodic re-indexing job (using cron):

indexer askbot --rotate --config /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf

Finally, add lin

Haystack search ============= Askbot supports Haystack, a modular search framework that supports popular search engine backends as Solr, Elasticsearch, Whoosh and Xapian.

Note

Haystack support in Askbot is a new feature, please give us your feedback at support@askbot.com regarding the possible improvements.

To enable:

  • add 'haystack' to INSTALLED_APPS
  • add ENABLE_HAYSTACK_SEARCH = True in settings.py
  • Configure your search backend according to your setup following this guide

Solr and Multilingual Support -------------------------

There is more documentation about solr and multilingual support please visit this link <solr>

Embedding video

Want to share videos in askbot posts? It is possible, but you will have to install a forked version of markdown2 module, here is how:

pip uninstall markdown2
pip install -e git+git://github.com/andryuha/python-markdown2.git#egg=markdown2

Also, for this to work you'll need to have pip and git installed on your system.

Finally, please go to your forum live settings <live-settings> --> "Settings for askbot data entry and display" and check "Enable embedding video".

Limitation: at the moment only YouTube and Veoh are supported.

LDAP authentication

To enable authentication via LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, see more info elsewhere) , first install <installation-of-python-packages> python-ldap package:

pip install python-ldap

After that, add configuration parameters in live settings <live-settings>, section "LDAP settings" (url /settings/LDAP_SETTINGS, relative to the forum base url)

Note

While it is possible to configure LDAP via web interface, it is actually more safe to add them in your settings.py file in the LIVESETTINGS_OPTIONS <live-settings-options> dictionary. Consider that a breach in security of your forum might open malicious access into your LDAP directory.

The parameters are (note that some have pre-set defaults that might work for you):

* in Login Provider Settings select "enable local login"
  • this makes login/password form available
  • enable/disable LDAP for password login -must check that, to connect the login/password form to LDAP flow
  • create accounts automatically or not (LDAP_AUTOCREATE_USERS)
  • protocol version (LDAP_PROTOCOL_VERSION) (version 2 is insecure and deprecated)
  • ldap url (LDAP_URL)
  • base distinguished name, 'dn' in LDAP parlance (LDAP_BASEDN)
  • user id field name (LDAP_USERID_FIELD)
  • email field name (LDAP_EMAIL_FIELD)
  • user name filter template (LDAP_USERNAME_FILTER_TEMPLATE) must have two string placeholders.
  • given (first) name field (LDAP_GIVEN_NAME_FIELD)
  • surname (last name) field (LDAP_SURNAME_FIELD)
  • common name field (LDAP_COMMON_NAME_FIELD) either given and surname should be used or common name. All three are not necessary - either first two or common. These fields are used to extract users first and last names.
  • Format of common name (LDAP_COMMON_NAME_FIELD_FORMAT) values can be only 'first,last' or 'last,first' - used to extract last and first names from common name

There are three more optional parameters that must go to the settings.py file:

* ``LDAP_LOGIN_DN``
* ``LDAP_PASSWORD``
* ``LDAP_EXTRA_OPTIONS``, a list of two-item tuples - of names and values of

the options. Option names must be upper case strings all starting with OPT_ as described in the python ldap library documentation. An often used option is (OPT_REFERRALS, 0).

  • LDAP_AUTHENTICATE_FUNCTION - dotted python path to optional function that can override the default ldap_authenticate function. This function allows to completely customize the LDAP login procedure. To see what is expected of this function (input parameters and the return value) -look at the end of the doc string at askbot.deps.django_authopenid.ldap_auth.ldap_authenticate_default. One use case for the custom function is determining to which group a user might belong or check any additional access rules that might be stored in your LDAP directory. Another use case - is the case when the default procedure just does not work for you.
  • LDAP_AUTHENICATE_FAILURE_FUNCTION - python dotted path to an additional function that may be called after a unsuccessful authentication. This function can be used to set custom error messages to the login form. The function should take two parameters (in the following order): user_info, login_form. user_info - is the same dictionary that is returned by the ldap_authenticate function.
  • LDAP_CREATE_USER_FUNCTION - python dotted path to function that will create the ldap user, should actually return a user association object, like askbot.deps.django_authopenid.ldap_auth.ldap_create_user_default. Function takes return value of the ldap authenticate function as a sole parameter.

Use these when you have the "directory master passsword" - for a specific user who can access the rest of the directory, these were not added to the live settings due to security concerns.

LDAP_USER and LDAP_PASSWORD will be used only if both are provided!

Since LDAP authentication requires so many parameters, you might need to debug <debugging> the settings. The function to look at is askbot.deps.django_authopenid.backends.ldap_authenticate. If you have problems with LDAP please contact us at support@askbot.com.

The easiest way to debug - insert import pdb; pdb.set_trace() line into function askbot.deps.django_authopenid.backends.ldap_authenticate, start the runserver and step through.

Uploaded avatars

To enable uploadable avatars (in addition to gravatars <gravatar>), please install application django-avatar, with the following command:

pip install django-avatar

Then add avatar to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file and run (to install database table used by the avatar app):

python manage.py syncdb

Also, settings MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL will need to be added to your settings.py file.

Note

Version of the avatar application available at pypi may not be up to date, so please take the development version from the github repository

Custom section in the user profile

Sometimes you might want to add a completely custom section to the user profile, available via an additional tab.

This is possible by editing the settings.py file, which means that to use this feature you must have sufficient access to the webserver file system.

Add a following setting to your settings.py:

ASKBOT_CUSTOM_USER_PROFILE_TAB = {
    'NAME': 'some name',
    'SLUG': 'some-name',
    'CONTENT_GENERATOR': 'myapp.views.somefunc'
}

The value of ASKBOT_CUSTOM_USER_PROFILE_TAB['CONTENT_GENERATOR'] should be a path to the function that returns the widget content as string.

Here is a simple example of the content generator implemented as part of the fictional application called myapp:

from myapp.models import Thing#definition not shown here
from django.template.loader import get_template
from django.template import Context

def somefunc(request, profile_owner):
    """loads things for the ``profile_owner``
    and returns output rendered as html string
    """
    template = get_template('mytemplate.html')
    things = Thing.objects.filter(user = profile_owner)
    return template.render(Context({'things': things}))

The function is very similar to the regular Django view, but returns a string instead of the HttpResponse instance.

Also, the method must accept one additional argument -an instance of the django.contrib.auth.models.User object.

Wordpress Integration

To enable authentication for self hosted wordpress sites(wordpress.com blogs will work with openid login). To enable it follow the following steps:

  • Check if you have the package "python_wordpress_xmlrpc from pypi.
  • Go to your wordpress blog admin panel and serch for: Settings->Writing->Remote Publishing then check the box for XML-RPC.
  • Go back to your askbot site settings and click on Login Provider Settings and then activate the option Activate to allow login with self-hosted wordpress site,
  • Input your blog url to the xmlrpc.php file it will look something like this http://yoursite.com/xmlrpc.php
  • Upload an icon for display in the login area.

After doing this steps you should be able to login with your self hosted wordpress site user/password combination.

Celery for background jobs

Askbot supports celery distributed task queue for some task, to enable it follow the following steps:

For supervisor: add this sample config file named askbot.conf into /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ directory:

[program:askbot_celery]
command=celeryd --loglevel=INFO

environment=PYTHONPATH=/path/to/project
directory=/path/to/project

user=nobody
numprocs=1
stdout_logfile=/var/log/askbot_celery.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/askbot_celery.err
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=10

Then run supervisorctl update and it will be started. For more information about job handling with supervisor please visit this link.

Receiving replies for email notifications

Askbot supports posting replies by email. For this feature to work Lamson and django-lamson need to be installed on the system. To install all the necessery dependencies execute the following command:

pip install django-lamson

Note

On Windows installation of the Lamson module may require additional work. Askbot does not support this feature on Windows automatically.

The lamson daemon needs a folder to store it's mail queue files and a folder to store log files, create the folders folder named run and logs within your project folder by executing the following commands:

mkdir run

mkdir logs

The minimum settings required to enable this feature are defining the port and binding address for the lamson SMTP daemon and the email handlers within askbot. Edit your settings.py file to include the following:

LAMSON_RECEIVER_CONFIG = {'host': 'your.ip.address', 'port': 25}
LAMSON_HANDLERS = ['askbot.mail.lamson_handlers']
LAMSON_ROUTER_DEFAULTS = {'host': '.+'}

In the list of installed_apps add the app django_lamson.

The LAMSON_RECEIVER_CONFIG parameter defines the binding address/port for the SMTP daemon. To recieve internet email you will need to bind to your external ip address and port 25. If you just want to test the feature by sending eamil from the same system you could bind to 127.0.0.1 and any higher port.

To run the lamson SMTP daemon you will need to execute the following management command:

python manage.py lamson_start

To stop the daemon issue the following command:

python manage.py lamson_stop

Note that in order to be able to bind the daemon to port 25 you will need to execute the command as a superuser.

Within the askbot admin interface there are 4 significant configuration points for this feature.

  • In the email section, the "Enable posting answers and comments by email" controls whether the feature is enabled or disabled.
  • The "reply by email hostname" needs to be set to the email hostname where you want to receive the email replies. If for example this is set to "example.com" the users will post replies to addresses such as "4wffsw345wsf@example.com", you need to point the MX DNS record for that domain to the address where you will run the lamson SMTP daemon.
  • The last setting in this section controls the threshold for minimum length of the reply that is posted as an answer to a question. If the user is replying to a notification for a question and the reply body is shorter than this threshold the reply will be posted as a comment to the question.
  • In the karma thresholds section the "Post answers and comments by email" defines the minimum karma for users to be able to post replies by email.

If the system where lamson is hosted also acts as an email server or you simply want some of the emails to be ignored and sent to another server you can define forward rules. Any emails matching these rules will be sent to another smtp server, bypassing the reply by email function. As an example by adding the following in your settings.py file:

LAMSON_FORWARD = (
    {
       'pattern': '(.*?)@(.subdomain1|subdomain2)\.example.com',
       'host': 'localhost',
       'port': 8825
    },
    {
       'pattern': '(info|support)@example.com',
       'host': 'localhost',
       'port': 8825
    },

)

any email that was sent to anyaddress@sobdomain1.example.com or anyaddress@sobdomain2.example.com or info@example.com will be forwarded to the smtp server listening on port 8825. The pattern parameter is treated as a regular expression that is matched against the To header of the email message and the host and port are the host and port of the smtp server that the message should be forwarded to.

If you want to run the lamson daemon on a port other than 25 you can use a mail proxy server such as nginx that will listen on port 25 and forward any SMTP requests to lamson. Using nginx you can also setup more complex email handling rules, such as for example if the same server where askbot is installed acts as an email server for other domains you can configure nginx to forward any emails directed to your askbot installation to lamson and any other emails to the mail server you're using, such as postfix. For more information on how to use nginx for this please consult the nginx mail module documentation nginx mail module documentation .