facebook_status 6.x-2.2

Release notes

This upgrade is recommended for everyone.

Major Improvements

Almost 100 changes went into this release. Most are aimed at improving stability. Here are the ones you probably want to know about.

• Many improvements to Views integration, especially for the Facebook-style Statuses Tags submodule.
• Added the ability to use Views to create RSS feeds of statuses.
• Added Pathauto integration.
• Added some JavaScript niceties.
• Fixed character counter bug with Panels.
• Improved Activity and Token integration.
• Improved API consistency and flexibility.
• Administrators can now send a status message to all users at once.
• Fixed bugs.

Upgrade Notes

• Everyone should run update.php after upgrading to this release.
• There is a new permission to access the settings page, and there are two new settings.
• Most default views have changed. If you have overridden the default views, I recommend cloning your changed view and then reverting the changes.
• A few Views handlers changed names, and as a result, your overridden views may have a "broken handler" listed. This could change the behavior of your view.
• You may lose patterns from your Activity publishing templates during the upgrade, especially for the "Owner" role. Write them down first.
• Developers: the API has changed significantly. Most of these changes were additions and most of the rest are backwards-compatible, but you may want to check the documentation.

Looking forward

With this release, I have fixed all of the bugs and added all of the non-disruptive features on my to-do list. Assuming this release turns out to be as stable as I think it is, I hope to move forward with developing the 3.x branch soon. The most important issue for the 3.x branch is #576278: Abstraction of statuses from users, which will allow status streams on Groups, wiki pages, and more -- but requires rewriting thousands of lines of code. It will be at least a few months before I will have a stable alpha release available.

In the mean time, I'll continue working as mentor for the Facebook-style Micropublisher project, which is part of the Google Summer of Code initative. Publicmind has been doing some great work to allow links, video, and images to be attached to statuses.

I'm also going to work more on stabilizing the Facebook-style Statuses Comments and Facebook-style Statuses Tag Suggestions modules.

And of course, Facebook-style Statuses needs to be ported to Drupal 7!

Changes from 6.x-2.1

Bolded changes are major, and affect most users. Emphasized changes are less major, but could be particularly useful for some users. Underlined changes affect developers.
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• #724238 Reload page content after status submit
• #652748 NaN characters remaining in Panels on User Profiles (changed markup; allows multiple forms per page)
• #725146 Fix Activity Integration by Scott Reynolds
• #728414 Profile tabs
• #728576 can only get fbss posts by the user and not posts done to user
• #690344 Performance and extra Views-related queries
• Minor whitespace cleanup
• #743030 sid and uid interchanged in Views status-text field handler
• Added "administer Facebook-style Statuses settings" permission per #541902 (note: changes permission to access module settings)
• #735998 Include Status ID in $data in Activity 1 records
• #687300 E_NOTICE warnings
• Made character counter use correct plural vs singular formatting
• changed $save_alerts parameter to $options in facebook_status_save_status() (still backwards-compatible)
• added $alerts parameter to facebook_status_delete_status()
• added hook_facebook_status_form_ahah_alter(&$new_form, $form)
• added hook_facebook_status_save_options_alter(&$options)
• added hook_facebook_status_delete_alerts_alter(&$alerts)
• added hook_facebook_status_render_components() and hook_facebook_status_render_components_alter()
• fixed $own parameter not working for 'all' time period in facebook_status_tags_popular_terms()
• Optimized tag-matching regex
• Fixed undeclared global $user variable in _facebook_status_conversation_title()
• Added weights to status update box form elements
• Fixed E_ALL notice with Author Pane when no statuses had been posted
• #752274 Break Apart Edit/Delete Tokens
• Added facebook_status_tags_popular_users()
• #751782 user warning when using with twitter 3.x
• Changed parameters of hook_facebook_status_render_alter()
• Added weights to admin settings form elements
• Made it possible to attach elements to the status update form (in code) with FAPI-driven AHAH and file uploads
• Changed the parameters of hook_facebook_status_save()
• #755774 Allow specifying a poster in "create new status" Rule
• #722124 let admin send messages to all
• Don't fire most alerts when a blank status is posted (for example so we don't get blank Activity updates)
• Added a code comment to the Empty text for the facebook_status view, so that people who are surprised to see PHP there know what to do about it
• #774326 PostgreSQL conflict in FBSST
• Removed cruft from facebook_status_token_values()
• Fixed broken views response link rsid query parameter
• #775722 Made edit/delete/respond/reply/re-post links always redirect to the right place
• Show edit/delete links on statuses with no status text that are specifically marked not blank by other modules
• #710684 "Form in form" problem causes status updates to fail (this fixed a major problem with Facebook-style Statuses Comments)
• Improved display of the "In response to" status in @responses
• Added a "Refresh" link to views attached to status update boxes (also added a new setting to toggle this)
• Improved speed of JavaScript behaviors
• Status update box on conversation page now auto-focuses
• Default text in status update form is now grayed out
• Disable "share" button if the text in the status update textarea is too long
• Allow specifying the number of rows of the status update box (adds a new setting)
• Fixed the "term link" location in FBSST is not honored in theme_facebook_status_popular_tags()
• Fixed duplicate key errors from the Tags submodule when an @mention and #hashtag had the same reference ID
• Added the ability to have RSS feeds of statuses
• Added RSS feeds to /statuses/recent and /statuses/terms/%
• #794372 Doubled Refresh Link
• Removed minor cruft in token integration (thanks publicmind)
• #653164 Use imagecache in views for poster pictures
• Added new tokens: [poster-name], [poster-name-raw], [owner-name], [owner-name-raw], [status-relationship], [status-comment-count] (plus numerous status created time tokens for anyone using a version of Token after 6.x-1.12)
• Added Pathauto integration for status pages
• An attempt at #726744 Mollom Support
• Fix for Activity integration. Warning: you will lose the pattern for the "Owner" role in your Activity publishing templates.
• Added a Views field for Tag Name that can show multiple tags
• Changed package to group FBSS suite at admin/build/modules
• Improved flexibility and readability of facebook_status_tags_popular_() (minor API change; backwards-compatible)
• #802380 Userpoints flood control limited to hostname (ipaddress) instead of the user
• #743904 Trouble Displaying Poster Picture in Activity 2.x view.
• Added a [status-formatted] token
• Added facebook_status_item_components($status = FALSE, $cacheable = FALSE)
• Added optional $options parameter to theme('facebook_status_item')
• Delete URL aliases on status deletion
• Simplified most Views handlers
• Changed wording of Views field/filter/argument/sort descriptions for clarity
• Added a "has a tag [of type]" filter to FBSS Views
• Fixed "All tags" filter from FBSST for Views only works with taxonomy enabled
• Made it possible for FBSST to be a base table for Views
• Improved "tag type" filter from FBSST for Views
• Allowed FBSST "tag name" field for Views to have tag names linkified and marked with # or @
• Added context-sensitive instructions for admin on getting #hashtags working in FBSST
• Removed broken explicit FBSS-User Views relationship, replaced with implicit relationship
• #806710 Insulate overridden default views from "undefined function" errors after FBSS is disabled
• Display the "processing" spinning wheel above refreshable content after submitting a status until the content has been updated
• Disable clicking a "Refresh" link faster than once every 2 seconds to prevent double-clicking
• Added a Views filter and argument for FBSST to only show statuses containing a given tag of a certain type
• Fixed invalid arguments in the default facebook_status_mentions and facebook_status_tags views caused by recent updates
• #808512 Twitter Clone using Facebook-style Statuses (Added Views Flag integration for statuses of followed users + current/argument user)
• Miscellaneous code cleanup, fixes and adjustments to other items mentioned above, and general polish.