django-lifestream is a lifestream application for django. It allows you to create a lifestream on your site easily.
A lifestream is a collection of items that are pulled from the internet via feeds (RSS + Atom). Typically these include your blog feed, your flickr feed, your delicious feed etc.
django-lifestream will sanitize the data coming from these feeds so that you can show html content from these feeds without worrying about the html containing nasty stuff that will expose your users to harm like some malicious javascript or a css hack (see: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/06/12/how_to_consume_rss_safely). It also helps maintain the layout of your site by fixing unclosed html tags and sanitizing invalid characters like <, >, ", ' and replacing them with the appropriate entities.
You can choose which tags and attributes that django-lifestream will allow by setting LIFESTREAM_VALID_TAGS in your site's settings.py. LIFESTREAM_VALID_TAGS is a dictionary whose key is the html tag name and the value is a list of attributes that are allowed for that tag. An empty list specifies that all attributes will be stripped from the tag. A value of None will specify that all attributes are allowed. The dictionary only contains valid tags. Tags not present in the dictionary will be stripped from html. The default setting can be seen in the VALID_TAGS dictionary in lifestream/util/__init__.py.
django-lifestream includes functionality for rendering lifestream items using different templates. This is done on a per feed domain basis. Each feed has a domain property which is populated automatically when you register the feed but can be changed later.
To use different templates per domain you create two templates, one for the lifestream list page and one for the item's detail page. You place the template in the lifestream/sites/ directory in your templates include path. The name of the list page's template is the name of the domain with '.' characters replaced with '-' characters and and html extension. So flickr.com's feed would have a template named 'flickr-com.html'. The detail page's template has the same name but is given a '_detail' suffix (i.e. flickr-com_detail.html).
The item is rendered in templates using the 'render_item' template tag. You might have a template like so:
{% load lifestream_tags %}
{% for object in object_list %}
<div class="item">
{% render_item object %}
</div>
{% endfor %}
django-lifestream includes some basic views for displaying the lifestream, displaying individual items, showing item's by domain, and rendering a RSS feed for the lifestream.
The standard lifestream views use the django's list based generic views so templates that work with generic views should work with django-lifestream. The default views are paginated using a default page size of 20 but that can be overridden by setting the LIFESTREAM_DEFAULT_PAGINATION setting in your settings.py.
django-lifestream includes support for automatically importing tags from feeds and saving them using dango-tagging. This support is optional and is only turned on only if you include 'tagging' in your INSTALLED_APPS.
django-lifestream includes support for plugins which can massage feed content before saving it in the database. This can include things like removing tags that you don't want to show on your site, filtering feed content to remove content with profanity, or massaging the text in the feed content. A few reference plugins have been included for commonly used sites. These may or may not work well with the feeds you are using and it's recommended that you write your own.
Plugins can be registered with the application by adding them to the PLUGINS list in your site's settings.py. The PLUGINS is a two tuple which contains the module path to the plugin class and the plugin name.
django-lifestream will use feedcache if it can be imported otherwise it will use feedparser normally. Feed data will be cached using django's cache backend.
django-lifestream includes a django command, update_feeds, for updating all feeds which can be run using manage.py. This can be run as a cron job that will update your lifestream periodically. It can be run simply by invoking manage.py with the update_feeds command.
python manage.py update_feeds
This will import all new items from all feeds that are specified as fetchable.