On a large scale I'm seeing users favour FBSMP status messages over traditional content types to submit information into a group.
This strikes me as really worrying news... since these aren't nodes we'll lose a historical record of communication within a group, and we can't do any of the million things we can do with nodes.
Couldn't FBSMP status messages be nodes (with automatic titles), image field, link field etc. but show a teaser in the activity logs as currently? In terms of Commons I would think this could be merged with 'Blogs', so creating a status message would create a blog post?
Status messages are a really handy and far easier way of submitting content into a group, far more familiar for people coming from sites like Facebook, but for this reason they're taking over nodes/comments which are surely at the core of Drupal.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #4 | message.png | 19.21 KB | lightsurge |
| #4 | image.png | 119.79 KB | lightsurge |
| #4 | link.png | 73.16 KB | lightsurge |
Comments
Comment #1
lightsurge commentedAhh, sorry, missed this in FBSSM #936600: Why Statuses are not Nodes? and how to combine Statuses View with the Blog entries and other items in a View?
So status messages will never be nodes, and I do sort of understand why.
I don't know if it's worth leaving this on though to see what others think of this in regards to Commons, though.
Comment #2
lightsurge commentedI think I'm either going to replace facebook style status updates with a 'status message' type system using formfilter http://drupal.org/project/formfilter and formblock http://drupal.org/project/formblock
Or what seems right now to be a preferable alternative, which is to keep FBSS but maintain some kind of 'archive' view of status messages per group and per user. Currently Commons Activity Logs only keeps a certain amount of days of log messages in a stream, so it would seem worth it to have this archive so we don't end up getting complaints like 'Where has all my work gone' as items disappear from the stream and aren't represented elsewhere.
Perhaps the latter could replace the blogs content type #1320524: Blog should be custom content type and not blog module.
Comment #3
david.moore.ipg commentedthis probably depends on the use case for your application. I think drupal is capable of transforming these (or some of them) into nodes at a technical level--maybe through rss--the issue is the workflow and getting things into groups. My site uses OG mandatory group so that everyone is automatically mad a part of a base group. For me, I could associate created nodes with that group. Straightening out notifications would be a hassle.
Comment #4
lightsurge commentedOn group streams I ended up swapping FBSS for mini custom node forms, styled to look and work similar to FBSS, but which are actually creating blog nodes... I created a new activity log rule to also style these 'blog' status messages like FBSS status messages, as well as a token to get the required data in.
I kept FBSS to work as a messaging system for /user entities.
My site was becoming largely dominated by status messages which weren't being particularly well manipulated/promoted by Commons (in terms of dynamic blocks of recent group content etc)...
It was also getting to the point where these two different types of content (nodes/statuses) had created two places to look for the same thing... e.g. some users would look in the Documents tab for documents, but the document they were looking for was actually in a status message somewhere down in the stream pile.
Attached are how the mini custom node forms look/work, which is really similar to facebook style status messages.
For user entities FBSS is fine, for group home pages we really need one or the other
Comment #5
soulfroysI'm in the same crossroads. Nice solution @lightsurge!
Comment #6
lightsurge commentedPerhaps if there's to be a more standardised approach to content that's 'micro-blogged' and ordinary content like nodes.. such a big change might be a Drupal 7 thing now?
If Commons moves away from FBSS for 7.x, automated migration of status messages could be a bit gruesome.
Comment #7
izkreny commentedIMHO, status messages in Commons 7.x should be just a simple interface / gateway for creating node (e.g. Discussion content type).
Comment #8
ezra-g commentedPlease see #1969088: Changes to group browsing widget & user status updates for planned designs that address this issue in Commons 3.x.
Comment #9
lsolesen commentedClosing out old issues. Please reopen if still relevant.