module

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....

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.

Facebook-style Links (FBSL) provides the ability for users to attach and submit links along with their Facebook-style Statuses. Combined with Facebook-style Statuses (FBSS), the FBSL module provides an attach link form that loads via AHAH. Users can then attach a link with an (optional) thumbnail, title and description to their status. In the nutshell, it imitates the link attachment feature on Facebook. [caption id=“attachment_484” align=“aligncenter” width=“607” caption=“Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca”] [/caption]

Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) is the successor project for FeedAPI ImageGrabber to support the Feeds module. FIG parses the Item URL of each feed-item, downloads the appropriate image from the post and maps it to an image field in the node created by Feeds module for that feed-item. [Google Reader (with thumbnails) can be imitated on a Drupal site by using Feeds, Feeds Image Grabber, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, ImageAPI and Views module].

Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) was released on 3rd March 2010, to support the Feeds module. Introduction FeedAPI Imagegrabber is a add-on module for FeedAPI. It consists of a parser which visits the original URL of a new feed item, and retrieves the main image from the post. Once the main image has been retrieved, it is then converted into a thumbnail using the ImageCache module, and stored in the node created by FeedAPI, inside a CCK field. The purpose of FeedAPI Imagegrabber is to make the feed more informative as well as interesting for the user. As, we all know that “comics are much better than novels”, this module appends the feed-item with an appropriate image from its content URL. The goal of the module is to mimic the thumbnail display of websites such as digg.com. This goal is acheived by using FeedAPI to turn RSS feed-items into nodes, and then using FeedAPI Imagegrabber to append these nodes with an appropriate image from the feed-item’s webpage.