Social networking profile for 7

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keesee's picture

create a feature filled social networking profile that rocks on D7. Buddy press is a good benchmark. http://buddypress.org/

Comments

Most of the work here is not

moshe weitzman's picture

Most of the work here is not related to the install profile. Thats less than a days work in D7. This project entails working on activity framework, user relationships framework, organic groups, status updates, perhaps facebook integration.

We are currently working on

johngriffin's picture

We are currently working on doing just that - releasing a social networking install profile for D7. As Moshe said though, the main difficulty here is that most of the modules which are required are not yet ported to D7, so this is where most of the work lies.

If you would like to collaborate on this then please let me know, we will be putting some serious time into it after Drupalcon.

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

Drupal 7

Parveen Arora's picture

Yes ,this is right to port the modules of drupal6 o drupal 7...
i will also work on this to make new drupal modules and port the
old modules to the newer one.
Please suggest me on what kind of modules i have to work with
and what kind of modules should be developed.

That's great. After

johngriffin's picture

That's great. After Drupalcon I plan to start co-ordinating an effort to upgrade the modules most commonly used in social network type sites, the more collaboration the better.

In the meantime though I would say that there are modules such as user_releationships, activity and og are important, but equally important are the standard modules such as views, ctools, panels and common modules upon which many others depend.

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

I would add rules.... and

keesee's picture

I would add rules.... and activity is great, but I recommend heartbeat in that it supports rules. Private messaging would be another great addition.

--
J.

The fact that heartbeat uses

johngriffin's picture

The fact that heartbeat uses rules is a double edged sword for us at the moment. On one hand it's great because it means that you can use the rules UI to add actions into the activity stream, on the other it's another dependancy and increased complexity which is viewed as a negative when we're trying to simplify things and improve Drupal's usability.

Either way, neither seem to have much interest in a d7 upgrade at the moment.

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

update

johngriffin's picture

Hi, in case anyone is interested in this there's some good discussion going on over at:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/53268

The modules which we've identified as being most important to upgrade for the first release of our D7 social networking distribution are:

Standard modules we use:

Features, Drush, Strongarm, Panels, Views, Coder, Drush Make, Ctools, context

Then the actual social networking functionality modules:

facebook_status
user_relationships
groups (og)
media
wysiwyg
comment_notify
profile2
activity / heartbeat
privatemsg

There are many more of course but these we feel are the most important for our highest priority requrements. We are tracking the progress of these and are working on upgrading some of them but don't have the resource to work on them all. If anyone wants access to the google spreadsheet which we use to track them then please get in touch through the contact form.

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

2009

Michelle's picture

Here's the 2009 SOC attempt at this: http://drupal.org/project/dsnf_install . I'm hoping 2010 is a better year for it. :) This is something a lot of people want, several people have attempted, but as yet has no good solution.

Michelle

Hi Michelle, it's good to

johngriffin's picture

Hi Michelle, it's good to hear from you! I'm aware of the dsnf, we tried to check it out late last year but never had much success, to be fair it does say on the project page that it's not currently working though!

I've read that you're concentrating on your own sites at the moment, but I'd be interested to know if you're looking at migrating to D7 any time soon? I'm trying to build up an understanding of who has an interest in getting specific modules upgraded to d7 so that we can combine efforts.

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

.

Michelle's picture

Yeah, it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, unfortunately. To be honest, I'm rather cynical of any effort to make a social networking install profile. I hope you succeed and wish you lots of luck but this is a huge effort that many people have tried and failed at, myself included. There's just so much involved, I think it's really going to take a company putting up money to hire someone full time to do it.

I won't be updating my modules to D7 anytime soon. They still aren't finished for D6 and I haven't even looked at D7 yet. Once I get the D6 versions done and the D7 versions of their dependencies are ready, then I'll dig in.

Michelle

well...

johngriffin's picture

Hi Michelle, well I have made a commitment for the next two months to be spending 3 days a week on developing this initial release of a social networking distro for D7, so hopefully something will come out of that. I think the key is to start small and not try to add everything at once, our first release will only include groups, friending and private messaging functionality, as well as a few other common additions to Drupal core. We just want to get something out there that people can start to use as a base while we begin to implement our bigger plans. Eventually we want to turn this into a distributed social networking product, hence the time I'm dedicating. We want to end up with a high quality product with excellent user experience which has appeal outside of the Drupal developer community - it should advertise Drupal to a wider audience and make it easy for people to get started.

Here's a quick roadmap for what we're looking to do:

  1. Build up a first release of a social networking distribution for Drupal. This will be a very simple collection of existing modules, built in D7.

  2. Implement distributed social networking protocols - following the ostatus project - pubsubhubbub, webfinger, activity streams, salmon.

  3. Re-factoring and probably re-writing a lot of the code to achieve a better abstraction for our use. This may involve things such as writing a relationships API, developing a privacy model for distributed social networking, and other such insanely difficult tasks.

  4. Productisation - improving usability, branding, making an awesome demo, collecting case studies, short sprints and regular releases - SaaS being the ultimate aim.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know the status of your modules with regards to D7, I totally understand! We hope to have some significant resource to put into helping upgrade modules down the line, but at the moment we're relying heavily on existing contrib and just want to get our current code stable!

Cheers,
John

John Griffin
http://atchai.com

Michelle, Johngriffin I

keesee's picture

Michelle, Johngriffin

I apologize for not following this post more regularly, but I love the thoughts expressed here. I'll be checking out DSNF and will hopefully have some useful feedback, but before doing so, here are some thoughts.

Drupal is beyond flexible, particularly when compared to alternatives in PHP open source. In this arena (social networking) however, there's a huge disconnect between module devs. It's the main reason why I used buddypress as a benchmark. Buddypress, and WP in general, are extremely limiting but the BP addon has managed to create an INTEGRATED feature set out of the box. While drupal has all of the tools and modules required to do it, I see a need for a module that ties it all together; integrating UIs and features in a way that make sense.

Simplicity is a key, but an undertaking such as this, IMHO, should utilize and require many of the mods available and be more of a connector than an innovation. Reuse the work and mods contributed by the community (private messages, rules, friend flag or relationship, and even panels or views) but do it in a way that cohesively presents them to the end user.

With that said, I look forward to checking out the aforementioned profile and contributing feedback.

Thanks,

J.

Meet the people and ideas in

yoroy's picture

Meet the people and ideas in this thread: http://groups.drupal.org/node/53268

Is there any update on that ?

JBI's picture

A website or a code repository to see how it went ?

I am curious to know as well

ajayg's picture

I am curious to know as well if there is any code available to try out. Some of the modules mentioned like user_relationship or activity do not yet have 6.x release out. Wouldn't you want to help those get released so you start with a stable base for 7.x?

out of the box!

keesee's picture

thx for the responses. Moshe hit it right on the head, yet I have something to add.

When ppl ask mewhy drupal over wordpress, I tell them that I can create a wordpress-like install in drupal, but can't create a drupal-like install in word press. cck, panels, views and the drupal core rule the world of open source CMSs, if you ask me.

Here's the other side of the coin.....
while drupal is much more powerful... other CMSs have made it easy.
Giving script-kiddies, who download and use, access to quick tools expands a CMSs presence. too much of Drupal focus is on the API and not on the quick fix.

how do create install profiles (for social sites, for education, for intranets etc...) without becoming wordpress??????

truth be told.... as a UI and implementing dev -- had I no experience with drupal, I'd pick WP and buddypress for a social site over drupal. Sad given that our community has much more to offer.

of its truly a days worth of work... why isn't it uploaded profile? the API, the modules, the blocks, the individual contributions mean a great deal, but the profile where they all work together is where biddy press kicks our ass.

IMHO

J.

Preaching to the choir

Michelle's picture

We all know it's needed. Someone just needs to do it.

Michelle

A profile is (in a way) a sum

bojanz's picture

A profile is (in a way) a sum of it's components. And those components still need polish, work, not to mention porting to D7 after D7 has been released.

Perhaps it would be good to have some sort of a central fund (jar, whatever), to which everyone who has the "we should improve social networking on Drupal" idea can contribute, and which could be used to fund parts of the work needed.

As it was said earlier, this is a massive undertaking, bigger than a summer of code.

Since everyone seems to have their own idea of what a social network should look like, the best way would probably be to provide Features, as something of a half-step between modules and install profiles.

Google Summer of Code 2010

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