Which version of user_relationships would you like to see maintained?
public
group: Social Networking Sites
alex.k - Sun, 2008-09-14 07:52
Still using 5.x-2.x
16% (9 votes)
Would like to see 5.x-3.x developed
18% (10 votes)
I'm on Drupal 6 and want a 6.x-1.0 release ASAP
63% (36 votes)
Other
2% (1 vote)
Not using user_relationships but another social networking module
2% (1 vote)
Total votes: 57
Sitewide tags: user_relationships
Please vote
Dear users of user_relationships,
I'm trying to get a feel of what the install base for this project is, as I've inherited it recently. Looking for feedback on which versions are in use and what the breakdown is between different versions. It would help to know this to see where the priorities are, and how much time to spend away from 6.x work to maintain 5.x branches, and which one.
I will accept patches and bugfixes for 5.x versions, as well as fix anything that doesn't get a patch, but will not do new development. If it turns out that there is little interest in the 5.x-3.x branch, it will be easier to deprecate it.
And 6.x is being actively developed.
Any opinions will be appreciated. Thanks!
Alex.
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The state of social networking for Drupal 6 isn't very good and people doing SN sites will need to use D5 for a while. That said, you only have so much time and I'd like to see your time put towards moving forward. Unless you have need for new features in the D5 branch, I suggest putting it in maintainance and working on D6.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
This module would be social
This module would be social networking in one. This module already works pretty well, but fully coming into fruition would change the social networking dynamic of D5vD6.
I need to be able to vote for a few of these ;)
I voted for 5.x-3.x just because I felt D5 was underrepresented here. But allow me to clarify.
I did some study of the code, and it seems to me the main difference between 5.x-3.x and 5.x-2.x is that 5.x-3.x separates the API part from the UI part. I think this is a worthy goal, because UR's default UI is a bit clunky to work with, and this separation lets site developers swap it out for their own custom thing if needed. It also mirrors what's currently in the 6.x branch.
That said, obviously 6.x is in desperate need of a stable solution. But 6.x is also in desperate need of many other modules before many people will be building serious social networking sites in 6.x, so 5.x is still the order of the day for people building sites right now.
The option I'd like to "vote" for is to focus development efforts on getting a stable 6.x release, but to please backport those fixes and improvements to 5.x-3.x and get a stable 5.x-3.x release as well, which mirrors as closely as possible what's done in the 6 branch. Once a stable 6 is released, I don't see any reason to backport anything but bug fixes to the 5.x-3.x branch from there on out.
Also, thanks for taking maintenance of this module so seriously. Obviously it's an important one for the larger Drupal community, so I'm really happy to see you trying to make sound decisions that are beneficial for everyone. Keep up the great work!
.
I'm with webchick. I answered without realizing the difference between the branches so I misunderstood the question. If you can develop the two in parallel and get two stable releases out of it, that would be ideal. That's what I'm doing with Advanced Forum. I don't really need the module for D6 myself but I know a lot of people do so I've been doing 5.x/6.x development in parallel and keeping the modules as close as the core changes will allow. This means having both branches working doesn't take a lot more time than doing just one of them and I can please people on both sides of the great 6.x divide. :)
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
5.x-3.x
I voted for 5.x-3.x. Here is what I propose.
Most end users are not
Most end users are not developers, and so changing the API won't make a difference to the majority of UR's user base. That said, developing for UR would be way easier with a more flexible UI, and SN sites won't move to D6 for some time yet.
Drupal Needs to Stabilized...not just D6
I am relatively new to the Drupal arena and I am looking for a social networking solution for a few ideas. I love the potential of Drupal and have been experimenting with 6 but I hesitate to sink too much in...why?
Not only is 6 slow to get supported on modules, themes, etc....there is already a D7 in the works! What gives?
.
The next version of Drupal is always being worked on once the previous one is released. Please don't drag this thread off topic into more beating of the dead horse. Since you're new, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren't aware of the horse but now you know. It's there, it's dead, and it should turn up plenty if you search. ;)
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Not so bleeding edge angst
With CiviCRM and Ubercart on at D6, I have stopped building new D5 sites and have started planning the conversion of D5 sites. Having said that, the warts on D6 do provoke puzzled responses from my clients.
D7 will be progress but not transformational. That will come from a startup or a fork. There will be hurt feelings if not blood on the keyboards.
I am still digesting wizdomes - http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/wizdomes.php Perhaps someone will back up to "dot" - http://www.graphviz.org/
Much of what we do is driven by vanity - ours and our clients
you use CiviCRM how
you use CiviCRM how alternative at user relationship?
small question regards CiviCRM: but it is a software that one install in drupal and manage with module,
or are module for manage own account on the site civicrm.org ? or both?
respect at OG, which are difference?
thank you
Thank you for the benefit of the doubt and I'll keep on track....where is that horse anyway? I've got a boot that needs some work. =)
is possible manage user
example that I want to do:
I how superadmin create a sub-admin1 and a sub-admin2.
they can to create own users but cannot see the others users ?
so sub-admin1 cannot see sub-admin2's users.
is possible with user relationship? and how
Other:
if I have a PRIVATE VOCABULARY with terms:
-term a
-term b
-term c
-term d
how can sub-admin1 (that have created own user: u1, u2, u3, u4) assign this access:
-term a accessible only by u1;
-term b accessible only by u1, u2;
-term c accessible only by u3, u4;
which is better and simple solution for to do this?
I know that there is the tac module, but it is too much complicated ; I want simple that sub-admin1 assign u1 at term a; u1 e u2 at term b...
so sub-admin1 not must to use all the tac's panel; have too much options and other problem is that if one can manage it can also set all permission (also for firstadmin and other sub-admin) not only the own options.
5.x branches comparison
A big thank you to everyone for their input. Your ideas are changing my impression of what's expected in the 5.x branches.
Looking at the results, 6.x appears to be chosen by a majority, I'm taking that to mean these users are not interested in 5.x, or can live without further work on these branches. A significant idea is that of releasing a stable 5.x-3.0 version, and co-maintaining that with 6.x - something I haven't considered before. I was actually thinking of abandoning the 3.x branch, it being so raw, but I'm going to rethink that.
With two thirds of responders choosing 6.x only, it makes sense to still support a single 5.x branch. It will probably be 5.x-3.x as long as I'm sure there is a migration path from 2.x. In that case I can essentially merge votes for 2.x and 3.x
Voting is still open, please feel free to pick the 5.x side, if I'm to believe social networking on 6.x is all that bad :P
.
It's a catch-22. Social networking on D6 is bad. See all the red and green on my D6 SN status page. But how does the situation improve? But getting D6 SN modules up to snuff. But there's only so much maintainer time to go around and time you spend getting D6 done is time away from improving D5. But people starting SN sites up are told to use D5 because the modules aren't ready for D6 and so they need attention, too. It's a messy situation. Developing for both branches in parallel helps if you can do it.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
RE: D6 is bad
D6 has its good points but I don't think we can get module maintainers to upgrade until g.d.o does. Why waste the time to go to D6 when D7 is just around the corner? Yea, yea, D6 needs some real love, there are still some things that just don't work yet. Maybe a call for a D6 patch-a-thon and coordinate with the maintainers of important modules to allow for CVS access for the members of the patch-a-thon.
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To clarify, I'm not saying D6 is bad. Just that it's not ready for SN sites, yet. What g.d.o is doing really has nothing to do with it. D7 is most definitely not just around the corner. As a module maintainer myself, having other people committing to my module will not speed the process up any.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Apples and Oranges?
Hello, Michelle,
Your D6 status page is a good start, but it also presents an incomplete picture, as social networking in D6 is executed differently than in D5 --
For example, both Bio and Usernode are now rolled into Content Profile --
Views Bookmark is now the Flag module, and can be used to Flag users (ie, low-impact Friending) as well as nodes -- it also has some nice integration with Actions.
The functionality of User Titles could probably be replicated using Flag and Actions --
Unique Avatar would have little to no effect in a user profile where Imagefield/Imagecache are used to generate avatars (our preferred approach, even in 5).
User Badges never had a stable release in D5, so the fact that it's not stable in D6 isn't hugely surprising --
Don't get me wrong -- it's still easier to roll detail-rich user profiles in D5, but the core pieces (IMO, anyways) are in place/close to in place in D6 -- not quite fully baked, but really close.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
And --
FWIW, in D6, I'd actually prefer a generic solution based around Flag than any of the buddy* or user_relationship* modules --
Given that Flag can work with users, has views integrations, ties in with core Actions, supports tokens, etc, we could get more for development hours (IMO) by working on user-related actions as part of the flag module. This would allow an almost infinite variety of customizable user relationships within a simple framework that already works with Views.
I saw Nate Haug demo some of what Flag can do, and it's pretty amazing.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
AMAZING!
Flag this as AMAZING!
Thanks for the flag, Bill! ;)
.
Oh, definitely, it's an incomplete picture. As you say, not all those modules are needed in D6. But it does give a snapshot of the state of SN in D6. I think the ones that are marked as "in development" are the key ones on there rather than the "not ported yet" ones in most cases.
We're getting there but D6 is still not ready for me to remake SocNet. Still too many key modules not ready yet.
As for flag, someone on IRC mentioned using that for a buddylist and I do plan on giving that a good look.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
I agree with bill. the core
I agree with bill. the core of what a social network is, is ready in D6. It's not just Userrelationships, there are also other modules such as Friend and Friendlist.
For me personally the only one that's desperately needs to be ported is Voting Actions (and magic tabs, but that's not SN related). When that's done I'll probably fall over dead in thanks.
And Flag is amazing. I'm just a little leery of because there's tremendous overlap between it, voting api modules, abuse, and friend, and so on. Those other modules all have other supporting features to make them especially suited for whatever purpose they're designed for, flag not so much. anyone know what direction flag is going? Is it going to try to implement all that large range of features to effectively replace all said modules, or will it try to find a different path?
Basically, I entirely disagree with Michelle, SN for D6 is ready, and having done a lot of thinking on this and comparing the 'exclusives' for the two I would definitely recommend D6 for new SN sites.
.
D6 is ready for SN if you don't mind 80% of the modules you are using being in active development. For a lot of people that is not an acceptable risk. Since people have pointed out that using upgrade status doesn't give a clear picture due to modules that have been replaced, I've done some more research and I stand by my opinion that it's not ready. Look at what just happened with views as an example of why using all these in dev modules on a live site is risky.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Point taken, especially on
Point taken, especially on views, that was certainly a disaster (for those like me who used the RC on a production site). But there are more than a couple of modules that AFAIK is done with development, but for one reason or another does not have a green release. But I think that outside of that, feature for feature, whack for whack, D6 still has more. Using D6 now would give you a more impressive and future proof site. I looked over your list, and I disagree in a few places. I'll write a response to it the next time I get a chance.
I agree. I'm not sure why
I agree. I'm not sure why people are building production sites in D6 when stable versions of CCK and Views have not been released yet. CCK is dependent on a version of Views, and the Views API is still changing. I wouldn't even consider building a site without these core pieces being stable.
If you're building sites for paying clients, how do you justify building their site on unstable code?
This is a pretty loaded
This is a pretty loaded comment. It is quite a rational choice to build on D6 now. The pain you get now can be far less than the pain of having to do an upgrade of a site that just went live. You can avoid the upgrade for 2 years. You are saying thats not valuable? So, thats just one way to justify it. Never mind all the nice features in D6 that save time and lines of code (e.g. theme developer module, internationalization, faster indexing, less memory used by menu system, ...).
Small-scale project
Small-scale project generally don't have to worry about that as much, and large-scale projects have a longer timeline that allows them an expectation of more stable releases by the time they're done.
To give us all an idea of
To give us all an idea of where D6 SN stands (in addition to Michelle's SocNet Playground): BabelUp is a live, functioning D5 social network site with almost all the SN features of Facebook (plus some other stuff). There are 19 modules I use that do not have stable D6 versions yet. Of those, I would not consider upgrading to D6 unless 8 of the most important ones were upgraded. User Relationships is among the 8.
Here they are:
Any information about the
Any information about the alternatives of "Invite"
Just looked and couldn't
Just looked and couldn't find any with official stable versions. TellAFriend has a 6.x version sitting in the queue and invite has a -dev 6.x branch that you can test.
Honestly, it's pretty easy to write a specific-need module to invite users to your site. The main reason to use a module like Invite is because a lot of other social networking modules (particularly the buddy* / UR* / Friend* / FriendList* module families) integrate with it. (On the other hand, they probably don't, yet, in the 6.x branches.)
To anyone watching 6.x
To anyone watching 6.x development, I've just released a new beta. To sum up the results of this poll, majority of you wants to see 6.x being prioritized (great! I want, too).
Between 5.x-2.x (monolithic API/UI) and 5.x-3.x (API compatible with 6.x, modular UI), I will stabilize 5.x-3.x at some point. But to port additional feature, I'd like some help to speed up the process. At this point 3.x is missing Views, Invite, Privatemsg, and a number of other features. If you are developing new sites on Drupal 5, please help me out. Without your help progress of 5.x-3.x will be very slow (to the point of not being much use if you need the additional modules).
5.x-2.x will receive bugfixes, but any new features would have to come from the community (I will assist and support, of course).
Thanks everyone for their invaluable input!