Glossary

Terms used to define, publish, retrieve, and render an activity feed.

Activities and Roles

Term	Meaning
activity	One published fact, with a verb, roles, and publication time.
verb	The action recorded as a string, such as upload. See Activity Verbs.
actor / object / target / context	Who acted, what they acted on, what the action was directed at, and its container. Recording covers all seven roles.
entity	A model or party filling a role. Each payload role contains an entity object or null.
Feedable	A model that can appear in an activity and provide its label, link, and other feed details.
party	A named participant without an application model, such as a system or integration.
anonymous	No actor was recorded, so who acted is unknown. This includes deliberately using Storyfeed::anonymous() or by(null); it does not mean nobody acted.
empty role	A role with no recorded entity. Roles other than the actor are empty, never anonymous.

Definitions and Stories

Term	Meaning
Story class	A class that defines activities. A resource class declares verbs; a Story subclass receives data and produces an activity.
feed file	routes/feed.php, where Story:: declares headlines and activity behaviour. It defines no HTTP routes.
headline	The displayed wording for an activity or group.
headline template	A headline with tokens such as :actor, returned in headline_template. See The Feed File.
keep latest	A verb policy that keeps only the latest matching activity in the feed.

Grouping

Term	Meaning
aggregation	Combining activities that share values, such as the same actor or target, into one feed item.
group	Related activities represented by one item, such as one customer's orders at the same shop. See Retrieving Feeds.
axis	What a group has in common, such as the same actor, verb, and target. This is the API term for its grouping rule. See Aggregation.
repeat	The fallback group for one actor repeating a verb on the same object type with the same target.
threshold	The minimum needed to form a group, such as three distinct actors. Set in grouping.policy.
group an activity is shown in	The one group selected for an activity in live(), falling back to repeat.
choosing which group shows	Selecting among groups whose thresholds are met, with repeat as the fallback. This runs at publication and through storyfeed:curate. With grouping.curate set to false, live() shows repeats only.
grouping period	The calendar hour, day, week, or month a group spans. Daily by default.
group node	A group represented in the payload. See Group Nodes.
sample	A limited list of distinct entities in a group; distinct contains the full counts.
count	The number of activities in a group. distinct.actors counts different actors.
composite	One activity about multiple objects.
batch	An actor's activities collected together. This is not a Laravel job batch.
window	How long Storyfeed waits for more activities before closing a batch.

Reading Feeds

Term	Meaning
retrieve / query	Access the database for feed data.
return	Produce a PHP value.
item	One entry in a feed, represented by FeedItem or an array from $page->items().
node	A payload representation, such as an activity node or group node.
named feed	A reusable definition of a feed's scope, verbs, and read mode.
read mode	The API choice of log(), live(), or summary(). See Retrieving Feeds.
live	The default read mode, with each activity shown in one selected group.
summary	The mode that summarises an actor's activities per calendar period using per-verb phrases, displayed as a summary row.
log	The mode that returns one item per activity without grouping.
cursor	An opaque page position passed back when requesting another page.
sync_token	An opaque value that changes when existing feed history changes. Discard accumulated nodes and fetch again when it changes. See Synchronization.

Rendering

Term	Meaning
render / display	Produce output for the frontend.
row	An item drawn on screen.
token	A placeholder such as :actor in a headline template.
icon	An activity's symbol, declared with icon(). Your frontend maps its token, such as shopping-bag, to artwork.
glyph / glyph()	The payload key and FeedItem method containing the activity's icon token.
intent	The icon's meaning, declared with intent() and returned in glyph_intent, such as success. Storyfeed defines no fixed vocabulary. See Icons and Intents.
icon image	A model's picture in entity.media.icon, such as an avatar or logo. See Image Slots.
body	Typed content beneath a headline, such as an excerpt or list. Its kind is its body type.
excerpt	A body containing quoted words, optional source attribution, and a flag indicating whether the text is partial. It belongs to the entity snapshot.
degraded	An entity with no snapshot yet, returned with label: null and url: null. Its activity still appears. See Handling Missing Values.
redundant	An activity with a tombstone in a role selected by its verb for redundancy checks. It still records what happened. See Redundant Roles.

Storage and Maintenance

Term	Meaning
snapshot	Cached label, data, and body fields for an entity.
trickle	Maintenance that creates missing snapshots, refreshes outdated ones, and finds deletions not reported by model events.
tombstone	A reference to a deleted model, including its former type and deletion time. Its activities may remain.
retention	How long activities remain before storyfeed:prune permanently deletes them.
healer	An application policy that selects activities for soft-deletion because their source is permanently gone.
soft-delete	Mark an activity deleted without permanently removing its stored record. This is what storyfeed:heal does.