Facebook-style Statuses (Microblog)

IceCreamYou - July 25, 2008 - 07:23
Facebook-style Statuses

This versatile module can imitate Twitter or Facebook's "wall" feature: each user gets a "status" or microblog where they can express how they feel or what they're doing to the community. Users can also post on other users' profiles (like on Facebook) or make references (like @userreferences and #hashtags on Twitter). You can also use this module for announcements, for example on single-user blogs.

Statuses are not nodes, which keeps everything light and quick.

Important Notes

This module is not affiliated with Facebook in any way.

Please see the documentation for the comprehensive API, a list of the many integrated modules, and a very thorough explanation of what the module delivers. 95% of this module "just works," and all of it is relatively simple, but there are a lot of major features that are not immediately obvious.

The demonstration site implements many (but not all) of this module's features, and acts like a micro-blog/Twitter/Facebook imitation.

Short Feature List

See the documentation to learn more or get help with these. There are many more features and each listed feature is more powerful than the description suggests.

  • Each user gets their own "status"/microblog/wall/guestbook
  • Users can post messages on other users' profiles or to their own profile
  • Users can see conversations (like Facebook's "wall-to-wall" feature)
  • Users can follow/be followed like on Twitter
  • Statuses can be "liked" like on Facebook
  • Integration with Profile, Views, Activity (1 and 2), Triggers/Actions, Rules, Flag, Twitter, Author Pane, Taxonomy, Input Filters, SMS Framework, User Relationships, FriendList*, Flag Friend, and more
  • Very complete developer API (including hooks) and theming methods
  • Open API at /statuses/openapi for other sites and applications to track updates
  • Pre-fillable status-update page at /share-status
  • @username and #hashtag references like Twitter
  • For single-user sites, admin can set a "special user" whose status can be shown announcement-style

Roadmap

Everyone is encouraged to use the 2.x branch; it is quite stable.

I am eventually planning to write a (separate) module similar to the Facebook Publisher, so that links, images, audio, and video can be posted via the status. This would be extensible so that other types of content could be posted as well.

Releases

Official releasesDateSizeLinksStatus
6.x-2.0-rc12009-Jul-0137.34 KBRecommended for 6.xThis is currently the recommended release for 6.x.
5.x-1.02009-Mar-1722.13 KBRecommended for 5.xThis is currently the recommended release for 5.x.
Development snapshotsDateSizeLinksStatus
6.x-2.x-dev2009-Jul-0237.4 KBDevelopment snapshotDevelopment snapshots are automatically regenerated and their contents can frequently change, so they are not recommended for production use.
5.x-1.x-dev2009-Apr-1322.15 KBDevelopment snapshotDevelopment snapshots are automatically regenerated and their contents can frequently change, so they are not recommended for production use.


 
 

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