During the end of 2014 happening we created a script that created different view of what had changed across a group of sites, the Conversation Clubs. This used a server side script that ran every 5 minutes and created a page that provided a link for each page that opened the federated wiki with just the twins of that page in the context of the referring site.
The load generated by this script was eased by a server change that changed the was the sitemap was generated. It no longer being generated on request but updated as content was updated.
Using a server script has a number of detractions including:
* the script fetched the sitemap anew every 5 minutes, as the script didn't contain any caching. * sites that are part of multiple conversation clubs will have their sitemap download multiple times every 5 minutes. * as it is unlikely that the conversation clubs page will be view every 5 minutes, its construction is wasteful of server bandwidth. * creating and maintaining a conversation club requires server access - access to the script, and cron when creating/deleting.
One way to address these detractions would be to create a more complex server component that could handle the creation of multiple conversation clubs.
An alternative would be for a plugin that held the definition of a club - the list of sites, and probably a set of parameters to restrict the size of the view. This would provide a potential for a more fluid creation of conversation clubs.
Implementation
The addition of the Roster plugin, together with some development of the Activity plugin provides a Conversation View within the client.
The Roster plugin allows use to define a named list of sites, see About Roster Plugin.
The Activity Plugin has been extended to allow the output to be customized using a series of commands. We can use: (i) the ROSTER command to have the plugin use a previously defined list of sites; (ii) the TWINS command to only show pages that exist on a number of sites; and (iii) CONVERSATION to add a link that will open all the twins of a page. See About Activity Configuration.