Shariff is used to determine how often a page is shared in social media, but without generating requests from the displaying page to the social sites.
This document describes the PHP backend. The following backends are also available:
Supported services
- Flattr
- GooglePlus
- StumbleUpon
Requirements
To run Shariff PHP Backend on your server you need:
- PHP 5.4 or greater
Installing the Shariff backend on you own server
To run Shariff under a certain URL, unzip the release zip file and put contents of build/
into a directory under the document root of your web server.
This zip file contains contains a configuration file shariff.json
. The following configuration options are available:
Key | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
cache |
object |
File cache settings described below |
domain |
string |
Domain for which share counts may be requested |
services |
array |
List of services to be enabled. See Supported services. |
Cache settings:
Key | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
ttl |
integer |
Time that the counts are cached (in seconds) |
cacheDir |
string |
Directory used for the cache. Default: system temp directory |
Service Settings
To pass config options to a service, you can add them to the json as well under the name of the service. Currently only the Facebook service has options for an facebook application id and client secret in order to use the graph api id method to get the current share count.
Key | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
servicename |
object |
options for the service |
Facebook service options
To use the graph api id method to fetch the share count you need to set up an application at facebook.com and pass in the application id and client secret to the options. It seems that the id method returns the most current share count, but it can be only used with an registered application.
Key | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
app_id |
string |
the id of your facebook application |
secret |
string |
the client secret of your facebook application |
Testing your installation
If the backend runs under http://example.com/my-shariff-backend/
, calling the URL http://example.com/my-shariff-backend/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com
should return a JSON structure with numbers in it, e.g.:
{"facebook":1452,"twitter":404,"googleplus":23,"linkedin":118,"reddit":7,"stumbleupon":4325,"flattr":0,"pinterest":3}
Shariff OO interface
If you need more control, you can invoke Shariff in your own PHP code. The following snippet should get you started. $options
are identical to those described above.
use Heise\Shariff\Backend;
$options = [
"domain" => 'www.heise.de',
"cache" => ["ttl" => 1],
"services" => ["Facebook", "GooglePlus", "Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Reddit", "StumbleUpon", "Flattr", "Pinterest"]
]
$shariff = Backend->new($options);
$counts = $backend->get("http://www.heise.de/");
echo $counts["facebook"];