Book Image

Drupal 7 Social Networking

Book Image

Drupal 7 Social Networking

Overview of this book

Drupal is ideally equipped to serve as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking websites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature. Drupal 7 Social Networking provides careful instructions and clear explanations to take you through the setup and management of your social network site, covering topics from users, to marketing, to maintenance. It will help you create your own social networking site, suitable for whatever audience you choose! Starting from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking, right through to more complicated aspects, you will progressively learn how to add to and expand your social networking site and add more features. You will learn how to secure your social network, deploy it on the Internet, and keep it running and well maintained. As social networking sites rely on the participation of their users, this book helps you to structure your site in such a way so that users can easily and enjoyably contribute, thus creating a powerful social network.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drupal 7 Social Networking
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Related user activity stream


Now that our users can connect with other users, and start to build a truly social network, we need to provide streams of information which relate to these connections. The heartbeat module can help us with just that; it's an extensible module which provides useful streams of activity, and comes with basic support, out of the box, for the User Relationships module.

Depending on the relationship type, we would want the stream to display a different message, for example:

  • Jack and Jill are now friends

  • Jack is now following Jill

This will involve us:

  • Creating a template for heartbeat to inform users of the relationship in their stream

  • Creating a new rule to detect when a relationship is approved (we don't want to add the relationship to the stream until it has been approved) and to send notification to heartbeat

A template for each relationship type

Let's start by creating a heartbeat template for the friend relationship; we need to go to Administer | Structure | Heartbeat...