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

docker pull rezozero/mixedfeed

docker run -p 8080:80 \
    -e MF_FACEBOOK_PAGE_ID="xxx" \
    -e MF_FACEBOOK_ACCESS_TOKEN="xxxx" \
    -e MF_INSTAGRAM_USER_ID="xxx" \
    -e MF_INSTAGRAM_ACCESS_TOKEN="xxxx" \
    -e MF_CACHE_PROVIDER="apcu" \
    -e MF_FEED_LENGTH="30" \
    rezozero/mixedfeed

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

Name	Default value	Multiple? (comma separated)
MF_CACHE_PROVIDER	array
MF_FEED_LENGTH	12
MF_FACEBOOK_PAGE_ID		✅
MF_FACEBOOK_ACCESS_TOKEN
MF_FACEBOOK_FIELDS	from,link,picture,full_picture,message,story,type,created_time,source,status_type	✅
MF_FACEBOOK_ENDPOINT	https://graph.facebook.com/v2.12/
MF_GRAPH_INSTAGRAM_USER_ID		✅
MF_GRAPH_INSTAGRAM_ACCESS_TOKEN		✅
MF_GITHUB_RELEASES_REPOSITORY		✅
MF_GITHUB_COMMITS_REPOSITORY		✅
MF_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN
MF_MEDIUM_USERNAME		✅
MF_MEDIUM_USER_ID	Use same order as in MF_MEDIUM_USERNAME	✅
MF_PINTEREST_BOARD_ID		✅
MF_PINTEREST_ACCESS_TOKEN
MF_INSTAGRAM_OEMBED_ID		✅
MF_TWITTER_SEARCH_QUERY
MF_TWITTER_USER_ID		✅
MF_TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
MF_TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
MF_TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
MF_TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
MF_TWITTER_EXTENDED_MODE	0
MF_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_ID		✅
MF_YOUTUBE_API_KEY

Install as library

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

composer require rezozero/mixedfeed

use RZ\MixedFeed\MixedFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\GraphInstagramFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\TwitterFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\TwitterSearchFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\FacebookPageFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\GithubReleasesFeed;
use RZ\MixedFeed\GithubCommitsFeed;

$feed = new MixedFeed([
    new GraphInstagramFeed(
        'instagram_user_id',
        'instagram_access_token',
        null ,// you can add a doctrine cache provider
        [] // And a fields array to retrieve too
    ),
    new TwitterFeed(
        'twitter_user_id',
        'twitter_consumer_key',
        'twitter_consumer_secret',
        'twitter_access_token',
        'twitter_access_token_secret',
        null,  // you can add a doctrine cache provider
        true,  // exclude replies true/false
        false, // include retweets true/false
        false  // extended mode true/false
    ),
    new TwitterSearchFeed(
        [
            '#art', // do not specify a key for string searchs
            'from' => 'rezo_zero',
            'since' => '2015-11-01',
            'until' => '2015-11-30',
        ],
        'twitter_consumer_key',
        'twitter_consumer_secret',
        'twitter_access_token',
        'twitter_access_token_secret',
        null,  // you can add a doctrine cache provider
        false  // extended mode true/false
    ),
    new FacebookPageFeed(
        'page-id',
        'app_access_token',
        null, // you can add a doctrine cache provider
        [],    // And a fields array to retrieve too
        null // A specific Graph API Endpoint URL
    ),
    new GithubCommitsFeed(
        'symfony/symfony',
        'access_token',
        null // you can add a doctrine cache provider
    ),
    new GithubReleasesFeed(
        'roadiz/roadiz',
        'access_token',
        null // you can add a doctrine cache provider
    ),
    new \RZ\MixedFeed\YoutubePlaylistItemFeed(
        'your_playlist_id',
        'api_key',
        null // you can add a doctrine cache provider
    ),
]);

return $feed->getItems(12);
// Or use canonical \RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\FeedItem objects
// for a better compatibility and easier templating with multiple
// social platforms.
return $feed->getAsyncCanonicalItems(12);

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:

new MixedFeed([…], MixedFeed::ASC);

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.

{% for socialItem in mixedFeedItems %}
{% include ‘social-blocks/‘ ~ socialItem.feedItemPlatform ~ ‘.html.twig’ %}
{% endfor %}

• 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

Feed provider class	Description	feedItemPlatform
MediumFeed	Call over https://medium.com/username/latest endpoint. It only needs a $username and an optional $userId for better consistency over requests (Medium seems to apply cache on their username requests even after changing a query parameter, i.e. post limit). Medium allows maximum 14 posts per requests.	medium
InstagramOEmbedFeed	Call over https://api.instagram.com/oembed/ endpoint. It only needs a $embedUrls array	instagram_oembed
GraphInstagramFeed	Call over graph.instagram.com/$userId/media endpoint with Basic Display API. It needs a $userId and an $accessToken. Warning: Access token must be refreshed every 60 days, use RefreshInstagramAccessToken	instagram
InstagramFeed	Deprecated: Call over /v1/users/$userId/media/recent/ endpoint. It needs a $userId and an $accessToken	instagram
TwitterFeed	Call over statuses/user_timeline endpoint. It requires a $userId, a $consumerKey, a $consumerSecret, an $accessToken and an $accessTokenSecret. Be careful, this endpoint can only return up to 3,200 of a user’s most recent Tweets, your item count could be lesser than expected. In the same way, Twitter removes retweets after retrieving the items count.	twitter
TwitterSearchFeed	Call over search/tweets endpoint. It requires a $queryParams array, a $consumerKey, a $consumerSecret, an $accessToken and an $accessTokenSecret. Be careful, Twitter API won’t retrieve tweets older than 7 days, your item count could be lesser than expected. $queryParams must be a key-valued array with query operators according to Twitter API documentation.	twitter
FacebookPageFeed	Call over https://graph.facebook.com/v3.3/$pageId/posts endpoint by default. Endpoint can be changed using $apiBaseUrl parameter. It requires a $pageId and an $accessToken. This feed provider only works for public Facebook pages. To get an access-token visit: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens. By default, picture, message, story, created_time, status_type fields are queried, you can add your own by passing $field array as last parameter. You can add since and until query parameters using setSince(\Datetime) and setUntil(\Datetime) methods. You can overwrite the default	facebook_page
PinterestBoardFeed	Call over /v1/boards/$boardId/pins/ endpoint. It requires a $boardId and an $accessToken. To get an access-token visit: https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/access_token/	pinterest_board
GithubReleasesFeed	Call over api.github.com/repos/:user/:repo/releases endpoint. It requires a $repository (user/repository) and an $accessToken. You can add a last $page parameter. To get an access-token visit: https://github.com/settings/tokens	github_release
GithubCommitsFeed	Call over api.github.com/repos/:user/:repo/commits endpoint. It requires a $repository (user/repository) and an $accessToken. You can add a last $page parameter. To get an access-token visit: https://github.com/settings/tokens	github_commit
YoutubeMostPopularFeed	Call over googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos endpoint with mostPopular chart (It’s more kind of an example feed). It requires a $apiKey with a valid Google Cloud Console account (with not null quota) and Youtube Data API enabled.	youtube_playlist_items
YoutubePlaylistItemFeed	Call over googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems endpoint. It requires a $apiKey with a valid Google Cloud Console account (with not null quota) and Youtube Data API enabled.	youtube_playlist_items

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:

protected $entityManager;

public function __construct(\Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface $entityManager)
{
    $this->entityManager = $entityManager;
}

protected function getFeed($count = 5)
{
    return array_map(
        function (Article $article) {
            $object = new \stdClass();
            $object->native = $article;
            return $object;
        },
        $this->entityManager->getRepository(Article::class)->findBy(
            [],
            ['datetime' => 'DESC'],
            $count
        )
    );
}

protected function createFeedItemFromObject($item)
{
    $feedItem = new RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\FeedItem();
    $feedItem->setDateTime($this->getDateTime($item));
    $feedItem->setMessage($this->getCanonicalMessage($item));
    $feedItem->setPlatform($this->getFeedPlatform());

    for ($item->images as $image) {
        $feedItemImage = new RZ\MixedFeed\Canonical\Image();
        $feedItemImage->setUrl($image->url);
        $feedItem->addImage($feedItemImage);
    }

    return $feedItem;
}

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

/**
 * @inheritDoc
 */
public function getDateTime($item)
{
    if ($item->native instanceof Article) {
        return $item->native->getDatetime();
    }

    return null;
}

/**
 * @inheritDoc
 */
public function getCanonicalMessage(stdClass $item)
{
    if ($item->native instanceof Article) {
        return $item->native->getExcerpt();
    }

    return null;
}