Hi Umashanthi, Thanks for writing this up. My comments are below.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Umashanthi Pavalanathan <[email protected]> wrote: > I am in the progress of preparing a proposal for the project idea: Simple > Social Networking for Roller[1]. I have prepared a draft of what I am > planning to do for this project. > I would like to get the valuable suggestions from the community. > Please feel free to share your thoughts with me. > > My plan for the project is as follows: (With reference to the description > given in [1]) > > Since there can be one way associations also between users(i.e user A may > follow B; but not necessarily user B follows user A), it requires to have > two new tables : Followers and Following. Why do you need two tables. Isn't all the follower information available from the following table? It might be good to think about what types of follower queries you will have to implement to support the features you want. > I think it is better to have a new table for Activity, since using the same > table of blog entries might lead to some problems. This activity table will > have a status message field with 140-character limit (This no of character > limit might be increased). There will Manager classes implemented to query > the tables. This is my feeling as well. This new Activity object should be similar to the OpenSocial Activity object, and note that OpenSocial is aligning with the ActivityStrea.ms model. > In the presentation side, there will be a theme with template to update > status message(this view will show owner's+followers' activities in reverse > chronological order),one view displays the owner's status update history, > another view displays only the updates of friends. This worries me a little because, in my opinion, we would want anybody to be able to post activities and see the activities of others no matter what theme they use. Which of these things do we really want? a - Ability to post an activity from within the pages of your own blog b - Ability to post an activity from within the pages of the Roller editor/admin UI c - Ability to view the activities of people you follow in the pages of your own blog d - Ability to view the activities of people you follow in the pages of the Roller editor/admin UI You should think about what Roller model objects (i.e. objects made available to the templates) you will need to implement the features you want. Also, what Roller Macros should be provided to help theme authors display/create activities. > Some features which can be included according to the time availability: > I need help in deciding the most suitable list of items to be included in > this project. I would like to get help from the community and potential > mentors. > - Mention a follower in a status message > - Re-tweeting facility > - Grouping the status message in to different categories > - Using the tinyurl support to shorten the urls > - Send direct messages to followers > > Do you want to suggest any additions or improvements? > I will prepare a draft time line for the project once I have received > feedback on this. Other than "mention a follower in a status message" I think most of those are very low priority. We're not implementing Twitter inside Roller, we're trying to make Roller more useful and social by supporting the notion of User Activities -- perhaps this is a subtle distinction. Hope that helps, Dave > [1]https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1861
