Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal

Posted by dahacouk on May 23, 2012 at 12:28pm

Start:

2012-06-15 10:30 - 2012-06-17 15:00 Europe/Madrid

Organizers:

dahacouk

klokie

Event type:

Sprint

The Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal sprint will run at Drupal Developer Days Barcelona 2012. The main sprint day will be Friday 15th June 2012 from 10:30 in the morning. We will also have access to dedicated sprint space on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th if we wish to continue. Win a free ticket (see Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal for details).

Competition

The prize is one free ticket for Drupal Developer Days Barcelona 2012 worth 25.00 EUR. No cash alternative available.
To enter the competition is simple: register for the sprint and make sure you contribute to the Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal wiki page. Also, use the Log message when you edit the wiki page.
The prize will go to the person with the best (in the eyes of the judges) contribution to the wiki page.
There are no other prizes. Though we'll have some prizes to award during the sprint.
The deadline for the competition is Thursday 7th June 2012 at 23:59 CEST.
The judges are Daniel Harris and Klokie Grossfeld of Kendra Initiative
We will announce the winner on Friday 8th June at 12:00 CEST.
If you have already purchased a ticket then you can still enter this competition. If you win you can sell it or give it away (for those precious Drupal Karma points). Unfortunately, we can't directly refund your previously purchased ticket.
And before you ask the answer is: no, we won't be pulling this cheap "free ticket" stunt for Munich DrupalCon 2012! ;-)

Objectives

Provide a common interface to access common functions across multiple social networks. Making it easier for:
- Developers to create and maintain social network integration modules.
- Site builders to utilise social network integration modules that harmoniously work together.
- Users to access social networks functionality.
Let's work on clarifying these objectives over the next few weeks leading up to the Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal sprint.
There are numerous modules for Drupal social networking integration.
- Connecting with other networks
- Pulling in content
- Pushing out content
- What else?

Sprint pages

Posted to

Acknowledgement

The research – carried out by Kendra Initiative – leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 248474 Socially Aware, collaboRative, scAlable Coding mEdia distributioN (SARACEN).

Comments

Interesting and ambitious undertaking

Posted by mrf on May 23, 2012 at 5:32pm

I think there are a lot of shared tasks when connecting to social networking sites, but worry that any one size fits all solution will result in a limited API integration for all of the services. Any solution should have a lot of flexibitily to be built on top of by other contrib modules to fill any current or future gaps (these services move a lot faster than Drupal contrib usually does).

From what I've seen from using the various Facebook integration modules, most of them have had their biggest issues when Facebook has changed their API and it has taken a lot of time and effort to catch up. I worry that having a generic solution for every service makes this situation even harder in terms of maintenance.

Don't want to come off too negative but wanted to confront the maintenance issue up front due to the fact the large social networks worry more about adding new features than maintaining their older APIs. I wish you the best of luck and wish I could be there in Barcelona to help out. Make sure to set up and IRC room so us interested outsiders can follow along!

Really helpful points

Posted by dahacouk on May 23, 2012 at 7:18pm

Yes, we have to make sure that this isn't a dumbing down of functionality but making it easier to maintain common functionality.

So, how can we help with that issue you mention of Facebook (or any social network) changing their API and the rest of us having to catch up? Perhaps if there was a shared Drupal Facebook API that was common to all Drupal modules connecting to Facebook, then it could be easier to maintain? With more hands on deck to maintain one code base rather than it being within each of their own modules.

We've really got to get input from the current module maintainers to see if this concept will fly. And, of course, lots of trust will be needed that abstracted functionality would be maintained. But as long as there's a softly-softly migration route then it should be cool to dip a toe in the water without committing everything.

There's lots of work to do before the sprint for sure.

I've added an IRC room to the todo list on the wiki page and made a note to contact the social network contrib maintainers.

I think the best bet for

Posted by mrf on May 25, 2012 at 5:33pm

I think the best bet for Facebook would be to focus on OAuth (which it seems is more common across other networks as well) and not try to support their other JS and PHP libraries at all.

Agreed. Added diagram...

Posted by dahacouk on May 28, 2012 at 2:52pm

Yes, this is all about code reuse and maximising results from the same effort.

I've added a simple diagram to the wiki page and I'll add it to this event page and the sprint page too.

If you have a comment...

Posted by dahacouk on June 11, 2012 at 6:21am

Seems like most comments are happening at the Abstracting Social Networking functionality in Drupal wiki page so perhaps that is the best place to add your comments from now on. Check there first for current input and status too.

Cheers Daniel