README

com_meego_planet is a social news aggregation component for Midgard MVC. It operates a bit like Planet by allowing multiple RSS feeds to be aggregated together into one consistent list.

What is a major difference between our social aggregator and Planet is that we have two views - the traditional Planet-like list of new items, and a list of most popular items. This allows busy users to easily see by glance the most important blog posts in the community.

The importance of posts is determined by various relevancy calculations, taking into account factors like:

• How many Tweets mention the item
• How many users have Liked or Shared the item on Facebook
• How many upvotes and comments the item has received on Hacker News
• How many times the item was bookmarked on Delicious
• The age of the post

Setup

You need a working Midgard2 + Midgard MVC installation. On top of this, enable this component in your application manifest components section:

com_meego_planet:
    - {type: github, user: nemein, repository: com_meego_planet, branch: master}

You also need a node on your site handled by com_meego_planet. Add this to the nodes section of your application manifest:

title: My Planet
content: <p>Welcome to my Planet</p>
component: com_meego_planet

Then just midgardmvc update and log into your site to add some feeds you want to aggregate.

Cron jobs

The Social News system comes with three cronjobs that you need to add to your cron configuration.

php -c php.ini com_meego_planet/bin/update_feeds.php

This command fetches all configured feeds, and imports items from them into the content repository. A good schedule for running this might be every hour.

php -c php.ini com_meego_planet/bin/update_scores.php

This command updates the Social Web scores of items. Run it couple of times per day.

php -c php.ini com_meego_planet/bin/update_age.php

This command updates age calculations for all posts. Run it as often as is fit for your environment. For example every half hour.

Background

This is a Midgard MVC port of org.maemo.socialnews, the Social News aggregator developed for Maemo News. This new version has been developed initially for Planet MeeGo.