I’ve mentioned previously on here about our wall boards at work. I love the wall boards, and I think we should be using them more and more, so wondered what else we could put on there. I’ve also been wanting to use Zend Framework more, as my experience with it has been minimal up until now, due to the use of the in house MVC Framework at work. So, put the two together and you now have Wallsplattr.

Wallsplattr is a web based twitter client with RAG status for a wall board written in Zend Framework (That’s a mouthful!). Currently if a tweet matches the RED words the background goes to red. If a tweet matches some GREEN words, you’ve guessed it, background goes to green. You can extend the application with whatever ‘decorators’ you want. If you want all tweets with the word purple in them to have a background color of purple, easy. You want all swearing removed, highlighted, censored? You want all tweets that have a timestamp between 5pm-9am to be removed from the wall board, done. All you have to do is write one class that implements an interface and you are done.

To configure what the current RED and GREEN decorators pick up on, all you need to do is edit the words in the corresponding json files:

• application/configs/green.json
• application/configs/red.json

The application is currently in an early stage, hence the 0.1 price tag. It has the basic functionality I wanted for our wall board at work, and therefore it won’t be mis-used at work either.. I’ve been working on this in my very scarce spare time, so it may be a little rough around the edges – but release early and often right? If you take a peak at the README.markdown file you can see my thoughts on the future, or more of what I should have actually done in the first place.

Wallsplattr in action on my stream:

One thing to note at the moment, is that it isn’t quite sure about sarcasm (!) or false positives.. I’ll get to that when I can, but for now it at least highlights tweets you may consider interesting to your search criteria. If someone wants to write some decorators then go for it.

To install Wallsplattr get the code from github and then

cd wallsplattr/
    ant install

This will download ZendFramework for you and explain about setting up a vhost to where you want to host the application

Oh, and before I forget, the awesome name credit has to go to the wife: Rebecca.. She is really happy about the name

Enjoy.