Drupal Social Web Application

Last week's assignment was to try and build the "activities block" as seen on the wireframe.  We'll talk about how we each had done ours during tonight / this morning.

22:16 Tokyo time... P2PU seems to be having some issues, it's reeeeally slow.  If you're online, please go to - http://www.tokbox.com/conf/oqmcw798yqmwvm0w for this week's video chat session.  So far no one is online...

Pirate Pad same as last weeks' - http://piratepad.net/sxRu1HeLxl

--
 

Ross Gardler was the only one who submitted his work on "activities block", you can check it out on http://github.com/rgardler/hippel_activity

This uses the Activity module, http://drupal.org/project/activity

I forked Ross's repository and git cloned it to my local machine to try it.  Not sure if things are missing or what, but it looks like it's just a feature export with the activity module enabled.  What's needed is for me to go into the templates and create a message for each activity available.  Unfortunately with the Activity module, here lies the problem.  It is only limited to node, comment and user activities... e.g. a user logged on / off, a node created / updated, a comment created.... etc.  It's very limited.

On this note, Soren pointed us to a different module - Heartbeat.

Heartbeat is more like a modern Drupal module, it has APIs for other people to make modules to hook onto so activities can be created for anything.  It works with the Flag module, so for example the "Star this idea" flag or "Add X as a friend" flag can all be recorded and shown as activities.  Check out the sample site - http://heartbeat.menhireffect.be/

--

We'll be making a bunch of features and together with a theme, it'll become a Drupal distro called "Open Hippel".  Once again, Development Seed is doing a really good job with ... well... everything they're doing!  LOL.  Anyway, read up on their best practices for building features:

"Kit" is a specification, it is a set of guidelines that facilitates building compatible and interoperable Features. - http://drupal.org/project/kit

and when we've built a bunch a features, you'll want "Build Kit".  Build Kit is a basic distribution meant to capture elements that are generally useful and make building Drupal sites and Drupal distributions easier.

http://drupal.org/project/buildkit