Social Networking/ Message Wall Add-On for MODx Revolution

Here is the patched transport package (version 0.2 alpha), which should now work if you follow the directions at http://websitezen.com/networkit. Again, please feel free to log in and post messages on the example site at http://flamebird.com (see login details above).

I really want the feedback, so please please please let me know if you think I’m on the right track, could have done it differently, made a useless addon, whatever. Thanks for checking it out!

Keep up the great work. I think you’ll find a lot of people will love this add-on.

Thanks Ryan! I guess nothing is terribly wrong with my code then? I have just discovered the beauty of transport packages and am attempting to build one. Should have something easily installable soon.

My absolutely-must-have to-do list:

• Delete messages by moderator and author.
• "Friends"/ social connections
• Pagination (with hopefully ajax)

My really-want-it to-do list:

• Caching system
• Filtering and searching messages
• A better name

Great work! You may put your code on GitHub to share and develop it with the community.

jakob: Yeah, github sounds great, but I’ve never used Git before. It’s next on my to learn list. Thanks for the tip.

I was asked an interesting question on the test site: How is the messaging system different from Quip?

I had actually considered using Quip and decided not to. My main reason was that my in-development site will have a large blog, and I didn’t want to put messages and blog comments in the same database table or manage them from the same manager page. Also, Quip doesn’t have private messaging capabilities or search capabilities and would be very semantically incorrect (using threads instead of "sent to"). In short, it would need a lot of hacking. I also like the fact that my current setup relies on FormIt and will benefit from FormIt updates in the future, and if I just hack Quip, I would need to manually update the component with any Quip updates.

What do you guys think about this? Would it be more efficient to just copy and hack Quip instead of reinventing my own messaging system? Or should I just keep Quip out of this and let individual site owners add it as needed? By the way, Quip should work great out-of-the-box for anonymous-only, public-only message walls.

Looks nice!

I came along on this shoutbox which looks a little at this only urs gona be much bigger and bolder;
http://tinyurl.com/ypdx5l

Currently working out a caching issue: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,61050.0.html

This is a great extra. Still working on it?

Yes, I am, but I have reorganized it:

• NetworkIt is now in a transport package.
• There will be dedicated database tables for messages and user friends/ connections instead of relying on existing tables.
• The message module may be added as an example only or as a completely separate package instead of the main feature.

The main problem that’s stopping development for me (other than time constraints) is that placeholders in recent versions of Revolution have a lot of problems when nested inside snippets or chunks and have very inconsistent caching behavior. Although I would prefer to have this package placeholder-based, I may have to resort to snippets and chunks instead for simple functions such as getting the user id number, unless placeholders are fixed within the next month or two.

Probable current timeframe for the first release: a month or two.