Description
Heartbeat displays user activity on a website. This module is an API to log activity. The logged data contains message structures, attributes and variables. Once the activity messages exist in the database, they will be parsed and build into activity streams.
Logging
Each module can log their own activity streams. This could be done by calling the api functions or by rules. This implicates that other modules, using the rules ui, can be interesting for Heartbeat if activity events and triggers are defined. Great modules that handle user relations like organic groups and friendlist describe rule events.
Display
Heartbeat has global configuration for display, message template configuration and stream configuration. Each stream (or access type) is a class based on HeartbeatAccess. It is basically a query builder (more gracefully in Drupal 7 branch thx to excellent database design) that returns its results to a parser.
The activity messages can be restricted on several levels which means that there are lots of access checks. Because sometimes this debugging is rather hard, heartbeat can now run in debug-mode. This way it's real easy to see why a message is blocked when viewing a stream.
Each message can have a number of attachments. E.g.: commenting, flags.
As community module, heartbeat integrates with flag_friend, friendlist and User relationships. The connected heartbeat is a built-in stream, available when enabling the friendlist_activity module. Make sure to select the friends API in the global settings.
Features
- Heartbeat logs activity for nodes, comments, users/profiles and organic group activity
- Integration module for flags, so each activity stream item can have a number of flags as message attachment.
- heartbeat comments submodule to comment on a message. Message templates can be set to use node-comments when in node context.
- shout submodule to shout a message like twitter or facebook's "What are you doing", and to allow commenting
- Heartbeat Display suite implementation to make the theming controllable by UI only. Build modes can be set per message type or overriden per stream.
- View integration although heartbeat is in fact a display module. The grouping and "max number" does not work properly. I strongly recommend using the heartbeat blocks and pages. Pages can be found at http://yoursite/heartbeat/[stream-name] .
- Drupal7 only Basic Node.js integration on streams.
Other modules that work great with heartbeat activity
Development
There is a test/demo site running at Menhireffect. This is currently under development as well and will updated frequently. It is always running in the latest version.
Enable the debug mode setting when you want to know in detail why certain fetched messages aren't shown.
Documentation
Implementation
Micro activity is an implementation of heartbeat that shows personal micro activities when hovering certain user-links.
Roadmap
Follow what's coming.
Dependencies
As of drupal7, heartbeat is dependent on Ctools. There are submodules that are dependent on others too, like rules, token, ...
Maintainers
This module is sponsored by Menhir. You can follow me on Twitter for quick release and documentation updates. My daily work is located at Krimson
Related projects
Project Information
- Maintenance status: Actively maintained
- Development status: Under active development
- Module categories: Community, Content Display, Rules
- Reported installs: 1863 sites currently report using this module. View usage statistics.
- Last modified: September 20, 2011
