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Action Streams

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

Please download the latest version from Six Apart’s GitHub repositry.

Install with the following steps.

  • Configure a cronjob (see below) for the script run-periodic-tasks.
  • Unpack the ActionStreams archive.
  • Copy the contents of ActionStreams/mt-static into /path/to/mt/mt-static/
  • Copy the contents of ActionStreams/plugins into /path/to/mt/plugins/
  • Navigate to edit your profile, and click on “Other Profiles.”
  • Build a list of your accounts from which to display and stream actions.
  • Edit your stylesheet to include needed CSS. (see STYLES below)
  • Edit your templates to display your other profiles and your Action Stream. (See the Template Author Guide in the doc/ folder.) A theme (template set) is also provided for convenience.
  • 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.

Please refer to the following documents.

CRONJOB

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(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.

Please refer to the following documents.

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