After months of hard work and support from Isaac and Thomas, I am proud to announce the first stable release of Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP). FBSMP allows user to share content such as links, videos, photos and documents along with their Facebook-style Statuses. It allows you to create a social networking site similar to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and others out-of-the-box. On the top, it integrates with a lot of other Drupal modules (as Activity, Trigger, Rules, Heartbeat, ImageCache, EmVideo, UserPoints, and more) which lets you do a lot more things with your website.

What’s in the box
As of today, FBSMP supports the following features:

• Attaches content using AHAH which keeps everything smooth.
• Publishes links, photos, videos, documents (ppt, doc, pptx, odt, etc) out of the box.
• Extensible to publish any kind of content.
• Integration with Activity 2, Rules, Heartbeat, Triggers/Actions, Input Filters, Views, ImageCache, Token, Application Toolbar(Appbar), Emvideo, Userpoints (through Rules), SlideShare.net API and more.
• Extensive developer API (including hooks) and theming methods.

It is difficult for me to elaborate on all the plugins (a plugin allows to publish one kind of content, for example Link plugin allows you to share your favorite links, Photo plugin allows you to share images on your site.), so you will have to explore them yourself. You can look at the documentation here: http://drupal.org/node/876500

How to get involved

• Play with it and share your site creativity here in the comments
• Write about this module so other folks can find it (http://drupalmodules.com/module/facebook-style-micropublisher)
• Report bugs or help in the support issues queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/fbsmp)

Enjoy it with your holidays, wish you all a Merry Christmas and a great year ahead.

Note: Feature and Support requests should be made through the Facebook-style Micropublisher Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

I worked on the module Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP) for Drupal, this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code program mentored by Isaac Sukin. This module lets users publish content (links, images, videos and documents) in a stream, along with their Facebook-style Statuses (like on Facebook, or Twitter). When I say that I worked on it as part of GSoC, it would be only partly true. I started working on it around March 2010, when I was contacted by Thomas to create a Drupal module for his site which would imitate the link share feature from Facebook, Google Buzz. I wrote the small module Facebook-style Links, which worked quite well but it was then this occurred to me, “why not create a module which can publish any content, which is extensible to publish any kind of content like images, links, videos, documents, audio, etc”.

Today, I am happy to say that Drupal now has a complete Micropublisher which can be used to create any kind of microblogging platform such as Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. I will be posting the first release of the module soon, but before here is the small list of features and a few screenshots. Continue reading →