Capture and organize replies to status updates on Twitter (and beyond).
This is not production code. This is a pre-alpha web application. The intended audience is server administrators with experience installing and troubleshooting PHP/MySQL hosted web applications. While ThinkTank uses OAuth to access Twitter, the webapp’s login is not as secure as it should be. Right now this code is for experimentation and tinkering only. Do not run on a public, production server. You have been warned.
In future versions, this will get easier.
- Download source code. Save it one level below your web site’s DocumentRoot. (That is, if your site’s DocumentRoot is
/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/, save ThinkTank files in/var/www/vhosts/example.com/thinktank/<code> folder. - Create a symbolic link to the
thinktank/webappdirectory in your site’s DocumentRoot folder. To do so,cdto the DocumentRoot, and useln -s ../thinktank/webapp/ thinktankcommand. - Make the
thinktank/webapp/templates_c/andthinktank/webapp/templates_c/cache/directories writable by the web server. - Note for upgraders: If you’re upgrading a previous installation, delete your cookies (in Firefox under Preferences / Privacy / delete individual cookies).
- Create a database and select it, i.e., CREATE DATABASE thinktank
- Build tables with
build-db.sql
- Log into Twitter and register your ThinkTank instance. Set the callback URL to
http://yourserver.com/path-to-thinktank-webapp/account/oauth.php
Write down the items labeled “Consumer key” and “Consumer secret.”
- Shared libraries: Rename
thinktank/common/config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php. Add your database credentials, file and webapp paths, and the key/secret you got from Twitter in the previous step.
- Crawler: Rename
thinktank/crawler/config.crawler.sample.inc.php to config.crawler.inc.php and set include path to the absolute location of thintank/common
- Webapp: Rename
thinktank/webapp/config.webapp.sample.inc.php to config.webapp.inc.php and set include path to the absolute location of thinktank/common
Visit the web application on your server, register/login, and set up your Twitter accounts.
Then, run the crawler to load your Twitter data:
$ php crawler/crawl.php
To view what’s going on with the crawler, use this command:
$ tail -f crawler/logs/crawler.log
Cron the crawler’s run command to go at least once an hour.
To discuss ThinkTank, post to the project mailing list. For deeper documentation in progress, see the ThinkTank wiki, which offers such gems as a detailed, helpful HOWTO on installing ThinkTank on Dreamhost.