Social in your site, the Drupal way

Most websites today require social integration. This usually takes at least two forms:

Allow users to share the site's content on a variety of social media platforms.

Display social media content on the site itself.

The first is a relatively easy problem, simply a matter of embedding share buttons or using a sharing service such as AddThis or ShareThis. This talk deals with the second form of social integration, displaying social content on your site, which often presents more of a challenge.

Ordinarily, displaying social media content from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. is accomplished by embedding an iframe from the relevant service into your website. This method is nearly as simple as embedding a share button, but comes with several drawbacks:

You don’t get much control over the look of the returned content

You don’t get much control over how and when it’s rendered (for instance, you can’t list all Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest content sorted by date created in one listing)

You suffer performance degradation by having to load this content from these external services on each page load, and you make your site vulnerable by forcing page rendering to depend on external service up-time

Fortunately, with Drupal’s robust tools, there’s a better way to deal with retrieving and displaying this content. This talk will show how to use custom entities and custom feeds fetchers, parsers, and processors to retrieve content from social media services and store it in your site in a way that makes it accessible to all of Drupal’s commonly used site building components and tools.

Session Objectives

Highlight a practical use-case for when to utilize custom entities

Discuss why custom entities can be the right approach

Demonstrate how to create custom entities

Illustrate how Feeds is a natural pairing for custom entities

Show how Feeds can be customized to import social media content

Inspire more thinking about developing the “right approach” to problems in Drupal

Length: 45 minutes
Experience Level: Intermediate

Transcript

1. Social in your site, the Drupal way
2. Kevin Champion web developer independent contractor 3+ years Drupal
3. social in your site *not* social sharing from your site a journey through development decision-making process intermediate This talk is...
4. This talk is… very simple
5. “there’s not always a module for that”
6. Typical approach #1: embeds
7. Problem space retrieve store render
8. Guiding • *do* control • *don’t* one-off solution • *do* extensible framework • *don’t* forget drupal • *do* harness “drupal way” control extend harness
9. retrieve store render control ? ? ? extend ? ? ? harness ? ? ? Matrix of the “right way”
10. Typical approach #2: custom custom retrieval custom storage custom rendering
11. retrieve store render control extend harness Typical approach #2: custom
12. A better approach storage retrieval rendering
13. content administrator experience (CAX) Storage: custom entities
14. CAX Storage: custom entities
15. Storage: custom entities fieldable integration out-of-the-box extensible
16. Retrieval: feeds proven Drupal contrib handles mapping import daemon
17. modular architecture: • fetchers • parsers • processors problems to solve: • authentication • data munging • storage Retrieval: custom feeds
18. custom parsers custom processors custom fetchers Retrieval: custom feeds
19. Rendering: Drupal’s wheel-house views blocks view modes panels templates
20. Final design retrieve :: feeds store :: social entity render :: views & blocks
21. retrieve store render control extend harness Right approach: feeds, entities, views
22. www.indstate.edu latest tweet latest instagram latest facebook
23. Demo
24. kevin.champion@gmail.com @kevinchampion drupal.org/user/1563308 drupal.org/sandbox/kevinchampion/2126797 github.com/kevinchampion/social