Translate between a WordPress blog and a NetNews group.
Uses the Wordpress REST API to fetch new posts and comments, and to create new comments to existing posts.
Interacts with the INN news server running on the local machine.
All files will be stored in the directory set as 'pathspool' in your inn.conf file, in a subdirectory named 'wpnngw'.
the directory $wpnngw/groups stores status and configuration data for gatewayed groups. Data for each gatewayed group is stored in a subdirectory with the name of its gatewayed group.
The subdirectory for each groups holds:
-
'history.json' contains the name of the group, the URL of the wordpress site, the list of top-level posts, and the timestamp of the most recent post or comment that was processed.
-
'queue' is a directory holding articles from wordpress that are awaiting posting to the newsgroup.
$wpnngw/modqueue is a directory holding articles from newsgroups that are awaiting posting to wordpress.
the $group/queue and modqueue directories are designed to handle processing failures gracefully (thanks: DJB). They contain three subdirectories:
- 'new' holds incoming articles that have not yet been processed
- 'cur' holds articles that are currently being processed, and retains any articles that have errors in processing
- 'fin' holds articles that have successfully beenn processed
addgroup.py sets up the group directory, queue directory, and history.json file for a new gatewayed group.
wp2nn.py finds finds new wordpress posts and comments, and posts them to newsgroups
nn2wp sends any newsgroup articles queued for moderation and sends them to wordpress.
gwmail.py intercepts articles posted to newsgroups and queues them to be posted to wordpress
user.py manages the $pathspool/users file for INN to use for authentication.
Posting requires 'rest_allow_anonymous_comments' to be set in the WP site's config, by adding this line to your theme's functions.php:
add_filter( 'rest_allow_anonymous_comments', '__return_true' );
See:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/rest_allow_anonymous_comments/
wpnngw hooks into INNs moderation pathway to catch netnews posts and forward them to wordpress.
First, the 'mta' parameter in inn.conf must hold the full path to the gwmail.py executable.
Next, all gatewayed groups must have a matching line in the 'moderators' file, the email address for that line should be '%s@wpnngw.local'.
Finally, all gatewayed newsgroups need to be marked as moderated. This will cause INN to look in the 'moderators' file to find the moderation email address. addgroup.py will automatically create groups as (or set existing groups to) moderated groups.
wpnngw is written for and probably requires python 3. it certainly requires the following python modules:
- dateutil (
pip install python-dateutil) - Beautiful Soup (
pip install beautifulsoup4) - lxml (
pip install lxml)
wpnngw was developed and tested installed into pathspool/wpnngw directory. It probably will, and certainly should, work no matter where you install it, but YMMV.
Confirm that the INNCONF variable at the top of wpnngw/util.py points to your inn.conf file
wpnngw comes with a 'runit' directory suitable for use with the runit service management system. The files in this directory run the wp2nn and nn2wp scripts, and log output to files in the wpnngw/log directory.
First make sure runit is installed on your system. If you're using a
systemd-based distribution (like most of linux ca. 2021), the
runit-systemd package will install and start it for you.
Next, confirm that the paths at the top of the runit/run and runit/log/run files are correct, and edit as necessary. Also edit the 'sleep' commands to your liking -- they control how often the scripts run.
Finally, run ps as root -- you should see a line containing 'runsvdir
'. is where runit will look for new services;
run cd <directory>, then ln -s <full-path-to-wpnngws-runit-dir> wpnngw. The wpnngw scripts should start runnig immediatly, and you
will be able to see output in wpnngw/log/current.
Convert quoted text<->html. '>' quotes from netnews are getting swallowed by the conversion to wordpress html.
gwmail silently drops all mail not for gatewayed group moderators.
addgroup sets new groups up to fetch all posts starting with the UNIX epoch. This is unlikely what most users want: there should be a commandline option to set this.