Invite a friend - Please help build this functionality

Posted by jumoke on February 2, 2011 at 9:45pm

Hello lovelies :)

I need to build an invite/evite a friend page for my drupal church site that replicates this functionality: http://www.northpoint.org/invite
Can someone tell me where to start? What modules can help me build this feature? Any ideas/suggestions will be greatly appreciated : )

Comments

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Posted by michelle on February 2, 2011 at 10:27pm

http://drupal.org/project/invite might be a good starting point.

Michelle

Hi Michelle, I appreciate

Posted by jumoke on February 2, 2011 at 11:49pm

Hi Michelle, I appreciate your suggestion. Thing is, I have been studying that Invite module even before posting and I realize it doesn't meet my needs--as Users simply invite others to join your site through registration. I am looking for the functionality where a user (anonymous or authenticated) can select a category of event to invite people to and it shows the "What your friends will see evite message" on the right like here: http://www.northpoint.org/invite And then emails them the flyer to event + customized message. How do you (or anyone) think this can best be handled? Let me know if you can think of any more ideas for me please?

.

Posted by michelle on February 3, 2011 at 12:59am

Well, I did say a "starting point". The basic invite functionality is there to build on. In general, if you've already looked at the obvious candidate it's a good idea to mention that in your post to save others suggesting it. :)

Michelle

Webform?

Posted by jumoke on February 3, 2011 at 12:17am

Thinking aloud:
I am wondering perhaps a webform could do this? Maybe I show the sample evite message in a block, then have them fill in their friend's email addresses and Webforms send emails to their friends...i wonder how to extract the multiple emails from the web submission and include the evite message. Am I on the right track? Are there other options?

The problem you're going to

Posted by Kirk on February 3, 2011 at 1:11am

The problem you're going to have to worry about is that a system as you described is basically a spam-bot's dream. If you're going to allow anonymous users to use this form, you need to be prepared to deal with that. Don't be shocked if your sever suddenly ends up blacklisted from many email hosts.

As a result, I would suggest reconsidering this functionality. Not only because of that potential threat, but also because in my experience, very few people ever actually use a form like you're describing.

Thanks Kirk

Posted by jumoke on February 3, 2011 at 2:39am

Hi Kirk, I understand your concern. However, I'd like to take my chances. It's a much requested feature from the decision makers and I found a great example to best explain this: http://www.northpoint.org/invite

I have a couple of webforms for volunteer signups, ask-a-question, etc. on this site anyways. I will take some spam-prevention measures and install a captcha. Hopefully this will help.

node_invite

Posted by esbon on February 3, 2011 at 1:33am

Here's an example with the node invite: http://www.capcitychurch.com/you-will-love-church

Hi Esbon

Posted by jumoke on February 3, 2011 at 2:44am

Thanks for the suggestion. I will take a closer look. It looks like there is no way to customize the email being sent to include an image/event flyer - I could be wrong, so I'll look closer.

email is customizable

Posted by esbon on March 23, 2011 at 3:45pm

Yes you can completely customize your email with images and text. You don't have to use all the variables included in the module. The idea of the module is to do an evite like invitation where people can reply if the will attend or not, but I don't use for the purpose. It is good I can go back and see the number of emails send in a given period of time.

Hi

Posted by MarketStone on February 3, 2011 at 4:58am

If You not afraid to code Actions, Triggers and Rules and a bit of jQuery. otherwise You need to use the invite.

Try Send

Posted by MickC on February 3, 2011 at 7:29am

http://drupal.org/project/send adds 'send to friend' links to nodes, controllable by node type.

Maybe Forward or Spread module?

Posted by andy_read on February 3, 2011 at 11:33pm

Sorry I don't have time just now to check out your reqs in detail, but these pointers might help:

I've used the Spread module before (http://drupal.org/project/spread) which aims for simplicity, but a more flexible alternative might be the Forward module (http://drupal.org/project/forward).

ecard module

Posted by deanw on February 5, 2011 at 6:12pm

I'm had success with the ecard module - http://drupal.org/project/ecard

Custom module(s)

Posted by Techivist on February 11, 2011 at 7:18pm

Hello.
It sounds like what you're trying to accomplish (& all the requirements you have for it) is something best done through custom module(s) that handle all that on the backend. With all the requirements you have & the way you've shot down many suggestions as needing more features that come with it, I'd say your best route is a custom module.

This is good news as you can always contribute back the module you created to the Drupal community (since you would have seen a need & provided a solution for it). :)

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Thank you so much

Posted by jumoke on February 24, 2011 at 8:59pm

I thank you all for your amazing suggestions in this thread. I have installed and tested the the Spread and Forward and from what i see so far, Spread is very close to what I need. Except the mollom integration throws "unsupported operand type" errors with my Drupal 6.20 now, so im troubleshooting that. Forward is great as well but just alot of unnecessary functionality i don't need now.

Techivist, I wish i can write a new module to accomplish exactly what i need now but time and resources are limited now. But it is definitely a module i'd like to do as a learning process : ) and it'll be more like extending this Spread module to work like this amazing heavingly goodness here --> http://www.northpoint.org/invite ; ) If anyone would like to join me in this process, please reach out and let's rock this bad a**!

I'd be curious to know how

Posted by jdwfly on March 8, 2011 at 6:14pm

I'd be curious to know how much your people use it. We used to have one and only a few ever used it. We have found it was one of those ideas that you sink a lot of time into, but in the end it doesn't get much use.