Importing Facebook groups wholesale into Drupal Organic Groups?

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
dahacouk's picture
Posted by dahacouk on May 11, 2013 at 11:45am

I'm wondering if anyone has done any work on importing Facebook groups wholesale into Drupal Organic Groups? I know we can export all the data from a Facebook group using the Facebook API. I guess the main task is to how to map Facebook comments (with revisions?), users, events and pages to a local Drupal instance. I guess make placeholders for these Facebook objects and allow these to be acquired retrospectively? Any ideas? Any projects with similar aims?

This idea has come out of a (unfortunately) closed discussion on the"OuiShare Global" Facebook group and I've added it to Drupal Social Initiative use cases.

Cheers Daniel

Comments

Hi, I think you could use

Posted by pinkonomy on May 11, 2013 at 1:06pm
pinkonomy's picture

Hi,
I think you could use Feeds module for this.I am not sure if you also need some custom code.Here is an article http://blog.hsl.virginia.edu/drupalpress/importing-users-into-organic-gr...

This idea has come out of a

Posted by scor on May 11, 2013 at 5:56pm
scor's picture

This idea has come out of a (unfortunately) closed discussion on the"OuiShare Global" Facebook group and I've added it to Drupal Social Initiative use cases.

Could you give more background on this? I'm curious to know why people would want to move from Facebook groups to Drupal OG. Is there any particular feature missing in Facebook for example? what else?

Looking through the OuiShare

Posted by dahacouk on May 11, 2013 at 7:08pm
dahacouk's picture

Looking through the OuiShare Global discussion, it started off being a need to archive the group and also being able to leave Facebook but still participate. Then investigating other platforms such as http://www.discourse.org and how Facebook limits conversation fluidity and fractures discussions. Then portability and fluidity between community spaces. In the first instance we'll just use the Facebook API to archive and display Facebook groups.

From my personal view the "particular feature missing in Facebook" is that they could switch off or charge for any group at any time and we have no control. I like the features in Facebook but I want to be able to do everything that Facebook enables me to do but in a distributed way and not using Facebook – or at least not having to use Facebook. There need to be free/open alternatives.

I'd also like to see Drupal able to support Facebook group like features and perhaps even bridge non-Facebook users with Facebook users if the Facebook API is not just read but write too.

Make sense? Please do ask more...

Re: Looking through the OuiShare

Posted by michaelmd on October 16, 2013 at 9:16am
michaelmd's picture

I guess one of the main problems is that platforms like Facebook (and Twitter, etc) expect every post to be from a user on their system and also often have t&c restrictions on where posts from FB can be sent outside of the "app" connecting to the FB api (which would be your site - so you could still see them there)

The FB api only provides connectivity for direct connection between an "app" (in this case the connector on your site) for a user (A FB user who has linked their account on your site with their FB account)

so it won't do proper federation but it is still possible build a connector

great

Posted by seosopt on May 14, 2013 at 8:25pm
seosopt's picture

Thats really a great idea , really appreciate it ! so all developer mindset can be in one place !