Sweetcron Launched, Create Your Own Lifestream Site

Sweetcron launched today as announced before, Sweetcron is php script that allows you to host your own lifestream on your site. Sweetcron is developed by Yongfook using, and it is written using Codeignitor PHP framework.

Installing Sweetcron is easy although not like wordpress installation, but it is still 5 mins installation. Grab the code if you want to host your lifestream with Sweetcron. You need to rename “config-sample.php” and “database-sample.php” to “config.php” and “database.php”, these files are located in system/application/config/ folder.

Create a database to use with this script, now open database.php file and fill the database details (username, password and database name). Open config.php file and change the baseurl value to reflect your domain name (line 14).

Now upload the files to your web root and point your browser to your lifestream you should see a link to install script. Click on this link it will take you through the installation steps, there are not many steps like wordpress create an admin account and you are done.

Once you install sweetcron go to admin dashboard, here you have to add feeds first to get the items to your lifestream. Go to feeds tab and add feeds like your blog, twitter, digg etc, whatever services you use for social communication you add here. Now go to Items tab and click fetch new items now, you should see your items now, your frontpage will show all your updates now.

Sweetcron has 2 themes as of now, one is sandbox which is simple and plan and the other is boxy theme which is quite good.

So far sweetcron delivers what it promised, there are some minor quirks though. If you use full RSS feeds like me and import them they will be imported in full, thus may create duplicate content. Also blog posts are showing as Photos instead of Posts or entries, it may be a problem with the way sweetcron template is designed. I will look more in to it. All the posts show comments link, i thought there is commenting system but there is no comment system, only a recommended link to disqus commenting, actually this is good if you use disqus or other commenting system in your blog also.

You can also post messages using sweetcrong but it doesn’t have any WYSIWYG editor yet. By default it updates every 30 minutes using a pseudo cron, you can run your server cron to change the update time interval. Follow the documentation and wiki to hack it to your needs.

Overall Sweetcron looks great, don’t expect a ton of features like wordpress, this is a simple script to pull your lifestream. This is the first public release and i am sure the later releases will have more features.

[Download Sweetcron]