Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress

Posted in Code, Plugins, Wordpress by Elliott Back on December 14th, 2006.

I liked the idea of a Lifestream view for my blog, so I took at Chris J. Davis’ Lifestream plugin. Unfortunately, it was limited to a small subset of RSS feeds, which I did not find useful. So, I rewrote the “engine” behind the lifestream to produce my own lifestream plugin. Enjoy!

wp-lifestream-logo.jpg
Version 0.1 BETA! Use at own risk! Not production code!

Features: What it does

You might wonder what this lifestream implementation offers over others. The primary differences are:

  • Pluggable, auto-detected data-source modules
  • Disk-based caching interface
  • RSS, Database, Facebook, Flickr API integration

WP-Lifestream ships with the following modules: Wordpress, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, and Wordie. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

lifestream-page.jpg

Download & Installation

This is the hard part. Download lifestream.zip. You’ll need to do the following, then:

  • Put wp-cron.php in your plugins folder and activate it
  • Put the entire data folder into your theme folder
  • Put stream.php and life.php into your theme folder
  • Customize stream.php to fit your template
  • Put images/lifestream somewhere sensible and change the references to it
  • If you want to use the Facebook or Flickr widgets, edit data/lib/common.php with your credentials
  • Make things writable that need to be. Things like data/lib/flickrcache, data/lib/cookie.txt, and data/cache are good places to start

That’s a pain. I’ll make it easier in the future, I promise.

Adding a new source

Adding a new source is the easiest and most fun part of the new infrastructure. There are just three things to do:

1) Write a class which implements a method called Refresh(){…} which will be called whenever the caches need to be refreshed and a method called Items(){…} which should return an array[time] = array(title, link), and has a member name defining its unique display name.

2) Create a file for your new source, and put it in the data directory. It should call $lifestream->AddService with your class, like $this->AddService(new YourDataSource());

3) Create a nice icon and add it to the images/lifestream folder and in stream.php. In the future module classes will be fully encapsulated with their own styles and icons.

If you do create a new class of source, please email me and I’ll include it immediately!

Changelog

.01 - initial version

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 1:53 am and is tagged with theme folder, source modules, plugins folder, facebook, data cache, flickr, data directory, data source, widgets, caches, member name, wordpress, subset, credentials, screenshot, lib, array, infrastructure, lifestream, ships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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