Mon Havre de Liberté

Jabber Feed is a Wordpress (the publishing platform I use for this public diary) plugin. It brings a new dimension to this platform by publishing posts and comments to XMPP pubsub nodes.

Description

To make it simple, in Wordpress scope, it simply means a realtime notification system through the Jabber instant Messenging protocol. You can compare this to RSS feeds with better advantages:

Realtime: RSS feeds are not realtime. You (usually through a program called an agregator) must regularly check news on the RSS feed. So if you set your agregator to check every 3 hours, you may have information at worse 2H59 late. This is what one calls a “polling” system (because it is up to you to go and pull the events).
At the opposite Jabber’s pubsub system is realtime because it is a pushing system: when a new event is published on the node, the server takes care automatically to redirect it to you as soon as possible.
Bandwith Sparing: to deal with the previous issue, some RSS user took the bad habit to configure their agregator so that it checks for news very often. So imagine if you have a website with a lot of visitors, let’s say hundreds, and they are “agregating” your news with their agregator configured so that it updates every 10 minutes. Then either you are a rich company or your website will be completely overloaded! With Jabber pubsub system, strictly the minimum information is sent, and only once (even with thousands of subscription to the feed!) by your website.
High Configuration possibilities on both side: the publisher can configure his nodes with default notification options according to one’s website use case; whereas on the other side, the subscriber can over-configure his subscription if he prefers other options fitting better to one’s needs. For instance, the user can ask not to have the full notification, but only the title (just to know there are news, but without getting the full information), etc.

State of the Project

The plugin is in extensive development, though should already work fairly well. Yet it is as for now rather a “Proof of Concept”, simply because very few Jabber clients have a good pubsub support, not to say none at all.
Currently the only Jabber client I found which could display something when it received the notification is Gajim in its subversion version (the other softwares I tried are only Psi, in its subversion version as well; and SamePlace, in its released version), but it is not much: just the title and the date of modification.
Moreover on the server side, things are a little more advanced, but still with very annoying bugs, which make using PubSub currently nearly unusable for common people (even if there were good clients).

Nevertheless with the growing support of the XMPP technology, I expect this kind of feature being soon implemented and really used by many people.

License

Jabber Feed is licensed under the GPL version 3 license.

Way of use

Currently the plugin, once installed, is composed of 5 parts:

• the Configuration page: there you set all the connection parameters;
• the modification of the “edit post” page: with a column indicating when a post has been successfully published on the Jabber node;
• the hidden publishing system: posts and comments will be automatically published on the Jabber nodes according to your chosen settings.
• the autodiscovery links automatically added to your blog’s pages
• Templates to add your own PubSub links wherever you want in your Wordpress theme

Download and detailed Information

You can get the last released version (current is 0.3), as well as the development version, on the official Wordpress Plugin Repository. You will find there also more detailed information to use this plugin.

Todo

I want to add these kinds of features (this is not the technical todo, but shows only general “big features”):

• manage also feeds for each “threads” (the comments for a specific post only) separately;
• automatically add Jabber feed information at the end of each post, as well as the footpage of your website;
• better published post management, as a way to republish post after a failure;
• modify already published items and remove published items when removed from the website;
• publication of pages?