LifeStream WordPress Plugin

Features | Download & Install | Screenshots | Custom Feeds | Forum

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Please post comments on our forums, as my blog is getting flooded :)

Note: There is a known issue with Twitter feeds. They are currently not updating after you first add it. This is a problem on Twitter’s end and will hopefully be resolved soon. (source)

Features

  • Unlimited number of feeds.
  • Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two.
  • Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code.
  • Customizable display using stylesheets.
  • Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam.
  • Localization ready! (Email me translations)
  • Daily digest available to summarize your activities.
  • Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website.

View a live demo of LifeStream.

Download and Install

You must be running PHP5 and WordPress 2.5 or newer.

ssh yourwebsite.com
cd public_html/wp-content/plugins/
svn co http://svn.wp-plugins.org/lifestream/trunk lifestream

Or if you prefer, grab it over at WordPress.org.

If you like the plugin, please rate it on WordPress.org!

Activate the plugin, and configure it under Settings->LifeStream.

Once you’ve added feeds, you can use the plugin in a few different ways:

  • Insert it into a normal page by using [ lifestream ].
  • Insert it into a template by using <?php lifestream(); ?>.
  • Insert it into your sidebar, in a more compact form, by using <?php lifestream_sidebar_widget(); ?>.

Screenshots





Custom Feeds (Extending wp-lifestream)

LifeStream was built with a very specific goal: to create a system which would support any feed with very little modification. All included LifeStream feeds are run off of RSS or Atom, but the underlying system allows you to generate a feed from anything, including a database or API.

Let’s start with quick example of creating a feed, using the included Skitch feed. Your feed is contained within a single class, which must extend LifeStream_Feed. Inside of this there are several constants which you are most certainly going to want to define:

class LifeStream_SkitchFeed extends LifeStream_Feed
{
    // A unique ID for your feed. Must not conflict with any other feed plugins.
    const ID            = 'skitch';
    // The verbose name for your feed.
    const NAME          = 'Skitch';
    // An optional URL for more information about this feed.
    const URL           = 'http://www.skitch.com/';
    // A description for the feed, shown in the add feed and edit feed dialogs.
    const DESCRIPTION   = '';
    // The label for showing a single event. It follows the <a href="http://php.net/sprintf">sprintf()</a> format and parameters are: feed url, feed name
    const LABEL_SINGLE  = 'Shared an image on <a href="%s">%s</a>.';
    // The label for showing a group of events. It follows the <a href="http://php.net/sprintf">sprintf()</a> format and parameters are: number of items, feed url, feed name
    const LABEL_PLURAL  = 'Shared %d images on <ah ref="%s">%s</a>.';
}

The constants are the very minimum required to operate a feed (which extends LifeStream_Feed), but there are also several functions within the feed which you may wish to override in order to customize your feeds interactions.

__toString()

Called when displaying the name of the feed instance in your feed management. This should return a string, and is typically the URL to the feed or some other key value unique to that feed.

    function __toString()
    {
        return $this->options['username'];
    }

get_options()

An array of arrays defining the options available for this feed. Please look at the included examples for more information and use cases of option types.

    function get_options()
    {        
        return array(
            // key_name => array(string label, boolean is_required, mixed default value, mixed choices
            'username' => array('Username:', true, '', ''),
        );
    }

get_url()

Returns the full URL to the RSS or Atom feed.

    function get_url()
    {
        return 'http://skitch.com/feeds/'.$this->options['username'].'/atom.xml';
    }

New in 0.50: get_url() can now return an array of URLs to fetch. You may also pass an additional key_name for use in more complex feeds.

    function get_url()
    {
        return array(
            array('http://skitch.com/feeds/'.$this->options['username'].'/atom.xml', 'key_name'),
        );
    }
 
    function get_url()
    {
        return array(
            'http://skitch.com/feeds/'.$this->options['username'].'/atom.xml',
        );
    }

yield($row)

The yield() function is passed one argument, the current row which is being processed. You MUST return an array, with at least a date and link value. The rest of the fields are entirely optional, but the default feed class looks for a title value.

    // This is from the Yelp feed
    function yield($row)
    {
        $title = $row->get_title();
 
        $on_part = ' on Yelp.com';
        if (substr($title, strlen($title)-strlen($on_part)) == $on_part)
            $title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-strlen($on_part));
 
        return array(
            'date'      =>  $row->get_date('U'),
            'link'      =>  html_entity_decode($row->get_link()),
            'title'     =>  html_entity_decode($title),
        );
    }

render_item($row, $item)

Called for each item when it is rendered. Should return a valid string. $row is the current row (from the database); $item is the current item (the row may be a group of rows, whereas the item is always the current item within that row).

    // Taken from the Twitter feed example.
    function render_item($row, $item)
    {
        return $this->parse_users($this->parse_urls($item['title']));
    }

Finally, you will need to register your feed with the LifeStream core:

register_lifestream_feed('LifeStream_YelpFeed');

If you are developing a feed which does not use RSS/Atom you will want to look at the internals of LifeStream_Feed to see how you can properly extend fetch() and any other calls which are SimplePie specific.

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