blank-social

INTRODUCTION

A simple, no-frills MVC approach to simplifying/normalizing the process of displaying a social networking feed on your website or app. It also provides a simple caching mechanism for your feed results to limit traffic to 3rd parties.

Supported Social:

• Facebook page feeds
• Twitter user feeds
• Instagram user feeds

Supported Languages:

• PHP
• [more to come]

This is a good fit for you if:

• You're frustrated with all the variation in social API services; you want a normalized solution
• You want a solution that's simple, without any force-fed CSS or bells and whistles; you just want simple information (HTML or JSON) that you can style yourself
• You want a lightweight solution
• You want to limit traffic to 3rd parties by caching your social results

INSTALLATION

1. Download/extract where desired (e.g. http://[YOUR DOMAIN].com/blank-social)
2. Rename '/custom/config_default.php' to '/custom/config.php'
3. Replace '[YOUR APP ID]' (etc.) with your social-specific app settings. Note that you can omit settings for feeds you're not using.

USAGE

Live examples:

Twitter user: http://blank-social.spaced-man.com/twitter/user/?theme=true

Instagram user: http://blank-social.spaced-man.com/instagram/user/?theme=true

Facebook page: http://blank-social.spaced-man.com/facebook/page/?theme=false&offset=2&limit=50

Query options:

• theme: If 'true' or '1', will return themed HTML (which can be customized —  see 'Creating custom templates' for details). Omitting this or setting it to 'false'/'0' will return JSON representing the social results.
• offset: An integer —  returns all results from the nth item (NOTE: by default, items are ordered by post date, decreasing)
• limit: An integer —  limit the result provided (NOTE: this is different than the 'social_cache_limit' variable in 'config.php', which defines the maximum number of entries stored in the cache)

Javascript AJAX examples:

[TO DO]

Creating custom templates:

If you'd like to customize the HTML result (for the 'theme' query option), you can do so by copying the '.tpl.php' file into the '/custom' directory. The template file is located in the appropriate social feed directory (e.g. '/facebook/page/facebook-page.tpl.php'). Just copy it over and mess around with file as desired.

TROUBLESHOOTING

[N/A —  To add as needed]

FAQ

Q: Have you finished writing a FAQ?

A: I haven't, sorry. Please come back later.

TO DO

• Add more social services (facebook user feeds, etc.)
• Add more control over query options (e.g. user IDs as options w/ generated JSON files for each requested ID)
• Integration w/ other languages

MAINTAINERS

Current maintainers:

• Tyler Shingleton (SPACED-MAN) - http://spaced-man.com