friendica-addons/statusnet

StatusNet Connector

Main authors Tobias Diekershoff and Michael Vogel.

With this addon to friendica you can give your user the possibility to post their public messages to any StatusNet instance. The messages will be strapped their rich context and shortened to to the character limit of the StatusNet instance in question if necessary. If shortening of the message was performed a link will be added to the notice pointing to the original message on your server.

Requirements

Due to the distributed nature of the StatusNet network, each user who wishes to forward public messages to a StatusNet account has to get the OAuth credentials for themselves, which makes this addon a little bit more user unfriendly than the Twitter Plugin is. Nothing too geeky though!

The inclusion of a shorturl for the original posting in cases when the message was longer than the maximal allowed notice length requires it, that you have PHP5+ and curl on your server. Where to find

In the friendica addon git repository /statusnet/, this directory contains all required PHP files (including the [Twitter OAuth library] 1 by Abraham Williams, MIT licensed and the [Slinky library] 2 by Beau Lebens, BSD license), a CSS file for styling of the user configuration and an image to Sign in with StatusNet.

Configuration

Global Configuration

If you have configured an admin account, you can configure this plugin from the admin panel. First activate it from the plugin section of the panel. Afterwards you will have a separate configuration page for the plugin, where you can provide a set of globally available OAuth credentials for different StatusNet pages which will be available for all users of your server.

If you don't use the admin panel, you can configure the relay using the .htconfig.php file of your friendica installation. To activate the relay add it's name to the list of activated addons.

$a->config['system']['addon'] = "statusnet, ..."

If you want to provide preconfigured StatusNet instances for your user add the credentials for them by adding

$a->config['statusnet']['sites'] = array (
   array ('sitename' => 'identi.ca', 'apiurl' => 'https://identi.ca/api/',
 'consumersecret' => 'OAuth Consumer Secret here', 'consumerkey' => 'OAuth
 Consumer Key here'),
   array ('sitename' => 'Some other Server', 'apiurl' =>
 'http://status.example.com/api/', 'consumersecret'  => 'OAuth
 Consumer Secret here', 'consumerkey' => 'OAuth Consumer Key here')
);

to the config file.

Regardless of providing global OAuth credentials for your users or not, they can always add their own OAuth-Key and -Secret thus enable the relay for any StatusNet instance they may have an account at.

User Configuration

When the addon is activated the user has to acquire three things in order to connect to the StatusNet account of choice.

• the base URL for the StatusNet API, for identi.ca this was https://identi.ca/api/
• OAuth Consumer key & secret

To get the OAuth Consumer key pair the user has to (a) ask her Friendica admin if a pair already exists or (b) has to register the Friendica server as a client application on the StatusNet server. This can be done from the account settings under "Connect -> Connections -> Register an OAuth client application -> Register a new application".

During the registration of the OAuth client remember the following:

• there is no callback URL
• register a desktop client
• with read & write access
• the Source URL should be the URL of your friendica server

After the required credentials for the application are stored in the configuration you have to actually connect your friendica account with StatusNet. To do so follow the Sign in with StatusNet button, allow the access and copy the security code into the plugin configuration. Friendica will then try to acquire the final OAuth credentials from the API, if successful the plugin settings will allow you to select to post your public messages to your StatusNet account.

Mirroring of Public Postings

To avoid endless loops of public postings that are send to StatusNet and then mirrored back into your friendica stream you have to set the name of the application you registered there of your friendica node is using to post to StatusNet in the .htconfig.php file.

$a->config['statusnet']['application_name'] = "yourname here";

Connector Options for the User

• Allow posting to StatusNet If you want your public postings being optionally posted to your associated StatusNet account as well, you need to check this box.
• Send public postings to StatusNet by default if you want to have all your public postings being send to your StatusNet account you need to check this button as well. Otherwise you have to enable the relay of your postings in the ACL dialog (click the lock button) before posting an entry.
• Mirror all posts from statusnet that are no replies or repeated messages if you want your postings from StatusNet also appear in your friendica postings, check this box. Replies to other people postings, repostings and your own postings that were send from friendica wont be mirrored into your friendica stream.
• Shortening method that optimizes the post by default friendica checks how many characters your StatusNet instance allows you to use for a posting and if a posting is longer then this amount of characters it will shorten the message posted on StatusNet and add a short link back to the original posting. Optionally you can check this box to have the shortening of the message use an optimization algorithm. TODO add infos how this is optimized
• Send linked #-tags and @-names to StatusNet if you want your #-tags and @-mentions linked to the friendica network, check this box. If you want to have StatusNet handle these things for the relayed end of the posting chain, uncheck it.
• Clear OAuth configuration if you want to remove the currently associated StatusNet account from your friendica account you have to check this box and then hit the submit button. The saved settings will be deleted and you have to reconfigure the StatusNet connector to be able to relay your public postings to a StatusNet account.

License

The StatusNet Connector is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license see the LICENSE file in the addons directory.