New:
Top 20 words My absolute favorite new ThinkUp feature is courtesy of Mark Wilkie: on any post that has more than 20 replies, click on the “Top 20 words” link in the sidebar menu. ThinkUp will display a summary of most frequently-used words in a reply set. Click on one to see all the replies which contain the word. Here’s an example of Top 20 words in action: http://smarterware.org/thinkup/post/?t=25077429986&n=twitter
Fun fact: This feature includes word stemming capabilities, so words like reply, replies, and replied all get grouped together. It uses the Snowball JavaScript library to do this. Fantastic work, Mark. Next up: phrase frequency, so the reply “Big Bang Theory” gets listed as one item in the example above.
Embed Thread plugin Copy and paste a bit of JavaScript into any web page to embed a post and set of replies sourced from ThinkUp. Activate the Embed Thread plugin in the Settings > Plugins area. Then click on “Embed Thread” on any post page to get the embed code. This plugin is a work in progress, so give it a try and let us know how it goes. A screenshot: https://skitch.com/ginatrapani/rmkpm/post-details-thinkup
Web-based application-wide settings We’re continuing to move as many ThinkUp settings out of the config.inc.php file and into the database as possible. In ThinkUp’s Settings area, an admin can now click on the Settings tab to open or close the installation’s registration page, and set reCAPTCHA keys as well. Screenshot: https://skitch.com/ginatrapani/rm2tb/configure-your-account-thinkup
IMPORTANT NOTE: This setting has registration closed by default on all new installations and upgraded installations. It overrides anything that is currently listed in your config.inc.php file, meaning, it deprecates the $THINKUP_CFG[‘is_registration_open’] variable and reCAPTCHA keys set there. If registration is open on your ThinkUp installation right now, after you upgrade to beta 8, you MUST log in as an admin and check this box to explicitly reopen it and transfer your reCAPTCHA keys into the text fields there and save. Apologies for the aggressive change here, but we want everyone’s installation to be closed/more secure by default.
Instagr.am support Thanks to Amy, all new Instagr.am images that the crawler encounters in beta 8 show up as thumbnails inline in ThinkUp’s post listings.
Activate accounts from the web interface Thanks to Randi, if your installation’s new account activation email is getting spammed, you can now log in as an admin and activate new user account by pressing an “Activate” button in the web interface. (You can also deactivate accounts as well.) In Settings, you’ll see this button listed in the “All ThinkUp Accounts” tab.
Command line interface to backups and migrations Thanks to Mark, advanced users with large databases can now back up their ThinkUp installation and run potentially large/slow database migrations at the command line. (For example, one of beta 8’s migrations changes the width of the tu_posts.post_text field; on my 12M row table, this took over an hour.) To use the command line tools, SSH in your server and CD to ThinkUp’s install/cli/ folder. There you can run php backup.php or php upgrade.php. The Upgrade script will show you the total time elapsed at the end of the migration. If the crawler is running when you attempt the migration, the upgrade process will let you know and tell you to try again later when the crawl process is complete.
Fixed: