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mixedfeed

A PHP library to rule social-feeds, to entangle them with magic, a PHP library to gather them and bind them in darkness

• Use standalone Docker server
  • Available environment variables
• Install as library
• Combine feeds
• Use FeedItem instead of raw feed
• Feed providers
• Modify cache TTL
• Create your own feed provider
  • Create a feed provider from a Doctrine repository

Use standalone Docker server

or use docker-compose: copy docker-compose.yml to docker-compose.test.yml and fill your provider credentials in it. Then execute docker-compose -f docker-compose.test.yml up -d --force-recreate, Mixedfeed will be available at http://localhost:8080

Available environment variables

Install as library

mixedfeed v3+ needs at least PHP 7.2, check your server configuration.

Combine feeds

mixedfeed can combine multiple social feeds so you can loop over them and use some common data fields such as feedItemPlatform, normalizedDate and canonicalMessage. mixedfeed will sort all your feed items by descending normalizedDate, but you can configure it to sort ascending:

Each feed provider must inject these three parameters in feed items:

• feedItemPlatform: This is your social network name as a string i.e. «twitter». It will be important to cache your feed and for your HTML template engine to render properly each feed item.

For example, if you are using Twig, you will be able to include a sub-template for each social-platform.

• normalizedDate: This is a critical parameter as it allows mixedfeed to sort reverse chronologically multiple feeds with heterogeneous structures.
• canonicalMessage: This is a useful field which contains the text content for each item over all platforms. You can use this to display items texts within a simple loop.

Use FeedItem instead of raw feed

If you need to serialize your MixedFeed to JSON or XML again, you should not want all the raw data contained in each social feed item. So you can use the $feed->getAsyncCanonicalItems(12); method instead of getItems to get a more concise object with essential data: RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\FeedItem. FeedItem will provide these fields:

• id string
• platform string
• author string
• link string
• title string
• message string
• likeCount int|null
• shareCount int|null: Share, comments or retweet count depending on platform.
• images Image[]
  • url string
  • width integer
  • height integer
• dateTime DateTime
• tags array (only used with MediumFeed)
• raw stdClass to access raw API object if canonical item fields are not enough

When FeedItem has images, FeedItem::$images will hold an array of RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\Image objects to have better access to its url, width and height if they're available.

Each feed provider must implement how to hydrate a FeedItem from the raw feed overriding createFeedItemFromObject() method.

Feed providers

Modify cache TTL

Each feed-provider which inherits from AbstractFeedProvider has access to setTtl() method in order to modify the default cache time. By default it is set for 7200 seconds, so you can adjust it to invalidate doctrine cache more or less often.

Create your own feed provider

There are plenty of APIs on the internet, and this tool won’t be able to handle them all. But this is not a problem, you can easily create your own feed provider in mixedfeed. You just have to create a new class that will inherit from RZ\MixedFeed\AbstractFeedProvider. Then you will have to implement some methods from FeedProviderInterface:

• getRequests($count = 5): \Generator method which return a Guzzle Request generator to be transformed to a response. This is the best option as it will enable async request pooling.
• supportsRequestPool(): bool method should return if your provider can be pooled to enhance performances. If you are using a third party library to fetch your data (such as some platform SDK), you should set it to false.
• createFeedItemFromObject($item) method which transform a raw feed object into a canonical RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\FeedItem and RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\Image
• getDateTime method to look for the critical datetime field in your feed.
• getFeed method to consume your API endpoint with a count limit and take care of caching your responses. This method must convert your own feed items into \stdClass objects, not arrays.
• getCanonicalMessage method to look for the important text content in your feed items.
• getFeedPlatform method to get a global text identifier for your feed items.
• then a constructor that will be handy to use directly in the MixedFeed initialization.

Feel free to check our existing Feed providers to see how they work. And we strongly advise you to implement a caching system not to call your API endpoints at each request. By default, we use Doctrine’s caching system which has many storage options.

Create a feed provider from a Doctrine repository

If you need to merge social network feeds with your own website articles, you can create a custom FeedProvider which wraps your Doctrine objects into \stdClass items. You’ll need to implement your getFeed method using an EntityManager:

Then you can define your date-time and canonical message methods to look into this object: