An initial PHP implementation of 'My Status Tool'.
See the changelog for updates.
PHP-MST is a simple PHP implementation of My Status Tool by Andy Sylvester.
In Andy's words:
My Status Tool is an application that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies.
PHP-MST includes authentication and the posting box only shows when logged in. It has the following functionality:
- make a short post (although there is technically no limit)
- add posts to a local file and build an RSS feed (default is 20 items but can be set between 10 and 50)
- posts can be edited by double-clicking them in the timeline
- each post has a page
- posts are sorted by timestamp along with those from any other subscribed feeds
- local storage for remote posts and display limited to 100
- an admin page for feed subscription & removal
PHP-MST uses Emanuil Rusev's Parsedown library for Markdown and my forked version of David Grudl's RSS-PHP.
It doesn't auto-refresh but prompts when your subscribed feeds have been updated so you can manually reload the page.
- copy all files to your chosen location and go to that location in a browser
- the setup page will be shown letting you specify:
- username and password
- your name (or the name you want for the instance)
- the base URL of the installation (where you browsed to above)
- your email address
- an avatar (image to be used for the RSS feed)
- choose date format (between UK - dd/mm/yyyy and US mm/dd/yyyy)
Submitting this takes you to the admin page and deletes the setup file (we don't want any accidents, do we.)
Please note: example .htaccess files are included (Apache) or you can use your own, you need to ensure that the correct file is set as the DirectoryIndex in each folder.
The admin page allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and remove them. It is intended feeds will be from other 'My Status Tool' instances which support rssCloud notifications.
You can also specify the 'refresh' time – how frequently PHP-MST checks for updates in minutes, and the number of items published to your local RSS feed (min 10, max 50, default 20).
The refresh time is stored in admin/refresh.txt and item count in admin/items.txt – DO NOT DELETE these files
There is also a link to 'clean' the remote items files (items.csv) to ensure it is kept to ~100 posts.
Add feeds as above to see updates from other people. The timeline is built on the fly from your own RSS feed and those you are subscribed to.
The posting form will be visible when logged in allowing you to post new statuses. These are then added to posts.csv (it is created on first post) and an RSS feed is created/updated in feed.xml. New posts will immediately be shown in the timeline alng with those from other feeds you are subscribed to. When a post is created it pings the rssCloud server so that subscribers can be notified of an update.
When a subscribed feed notifies of an update a new file notify/count.txt is created. Using HTMX, count.php is reloaded at the refresh interval in /admin to check for the existence of count.txt – if it exists (or holds a value greater than zero) it will show a div prompting to load new items. Reloading the page will delete count.txt.
Replies
A reply icon will appear to the right of each post when logged in. Clicking this will set a hidden input value to the URL of the post you are replying to. This is then added to the RSS feed as an mst:reply item element so that the tool can pick out and display replies.
The rssCloud server being used (Andrew Shell's at http://rpc.rsscloud.io/) requires you to resubscribe to feeds for notifications every 24 hours (the subscription is deleted after 25 hours.)
You will, therefore, need to create a cron job to load pleaseNotify.php once a day to ensure notifications are received.
It is advisable to create a cron job to periodically load clean.php to ensure the items.csv file is kept to ~100 posts.
- tidy up some more inline CSS on the admin page (I'll get round to it eventually)
- think about some kind of 'reply' mechanism