Seeking ideas for a Drupal for Facebook demo
Mon, 10/22/2007 - 15:23 — Dave Cohen
Earlier this year I demonstrated Drupal for Facebook. In that demo, I built a very simple blog site in Drupal, and I showed how to expose the same content in Facebook. The result was a very simple Facebook application in which anyone who installed the app could post to their own blog. And the blog posts would appear on their facebook profile.
For the BadCamp demo, I could do exactly the same thing, but I’d like to know if anyone has other ideas. Is there something you’d particularly like to see in a Facebook App? Do you have a favorite Drupal module you’d like to see made into a Facebook App?
I’m looking for something relatively easy to implement in Drupal, and that can be explained during the 1 hour presentation. Any ideas are welcome.
Comments
BuddyList integration
I would like to figure out how to link / sync Facebook friends list with Drupal BuddyList. The idea is to use Drupal to build social networks that could use FB social graph – but not be limited to it.
I think because of time
I think because of time constraints I won’t demo anything related to the BuddyList. But let’s talk about it when we’re face to face at the conference.
My plan is to show a simple blogging app, much like I showed in Barcelona, with some of the recent improvements. This makes a nice demo because it requires few, if any, third-party apps.
Definitely, we should talk
Definitely, we should talk about BuddyList and other features in the issue queue… Hope we’d at least check out BuddyList and think about integration before the event.
Good idea, maybe a good demo
Dmitriy, I like this idea and I’m thinking over whether it would make a good demo. If I get what you’re suggesting, its something like this:
When a new facebook user adds the app (that is, becomes both a facebook user and a drupal user), their BuddyList automatically includes any of their Facebook friends who have added the app. And over time, the list remains syncronized so that as other friends add the app, they automatically get added to the BuddyList.
I like this as a demo idea because it would illustrate that a third party module can use Drupal for Facebook APIs to simplify facebook-related development. On the other hand I’m not sure how much work is involved in making this work. At this point, I’ve never used the BuddyList module. I may look this over this coming weekend and see if I can put it together in time.
Discussion issues, posted to D4F project
There are several issues that I posted on drupal.org that we should discuss at the Camp –
1) CSS Customization
http://drupal.org/node/188102
2) API to support custom apps
http://drupal.org/node/188106
3) BuddyList integration
http://drupal.org/node/188107
Basically yes, but beware TOS
Yes, that is the idea. Note for every friend relationship there are 3 cases & uses:
1) Friend is a FB friend, but not BL friend => leverage FB social graph
2) Friend is BL friend, but not FB friend => leverage Internet marketing
3) Friend is both FB and BL friend => consistent user experience across both
I think the synchronization should not be automatic, as it might violate Facebook TOS, that disallows storing friend relationships in a database. However an explicit prompt to create a BL relation (i.e. 1=>3 transition) should be legit.
One more thing, inviting friends to be BL friends would require them to accept and create a Drupal account first. So we should think through the workflow on install. One thing that I see missing in these FB-initiated Drupal accounts is email address. Perhaps it should be prompted?
So in essence BuddyList would only reflect a subset of FB friends (much like you create in apps like Top Friends), plus any other Drupal users added manually.
BuddyList should not be too hard and this demo will pave a way to creating custom sub-networks.