Drupal Planet

• What:  Birds of a Feather meeting at DrupalCon Chicago
• Date/Time: Thursday, March 10th, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
• Room: Erie 

Are you interested in allowing your Drupal users to login with their accounts on popular social networking sites? Would you like these users to easily share Drupal content and comments on these networks and drive traffic back to your website?

Do you want your Drupal site visitors to quickly sign-in with their accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo! or other popular websites?  Do you need to map user profile data from these third-party sites and store them in Drupal fields?  Want to instantly empower your users to share Drupal content and comments with all of their friends, followers, and fans?

If you've answered "yes" to any of these questions, then the Janrain Engage module may be just what the doctor (or developer!) ordered.

I discovered the underlying Janrain Engage service about a year ago when I was trying to figure out how to most efficiently integrate my Drupal websites with the larger social web.  I also discovered that a contributed module for Janrain Engage (formerly RPX) already existed, but could use some serious love.  Since then, I've become very active in the development of the Janrain Engage module (and even signed on as a co-maintainer).

Using the Janrain Engage module and service, Drupal sites can authenticate new and existing users with popular third-party websites, map user profile data from these websites to Drupal fields, and share Drupal content with a user's existing social network on multiple third-party sites.  In particular, the module helps Drupal websites quickly integrate with 18 social networks and service providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Myspace, AOL, PayPal, Flickr, and Windows Live.

Instead of having to integrate with each of these sites on your own (and manage API changes over time), Janrain Engage does the heavy lifting for you.

And best of all, there is a free version of the Janrain Engage service that has a surprising number of high-end features.  (If you're working on an enterprise-level site—NPR, Sears, and Get Satisfaction all use Janrain Engage—you can also purchase higher-level service.)

On the Drupal side of things, we've worked hard on the module so that any Drupal developer or site builder can quickly enable it the usual way, configure its settings in under 10 minutes, and then have it "just work."

In the remainder of this blog post, I will describe some of the cool features and UI enhancements we've added to the Janrain Engage module in the last couple of months.

FEATURES IN THE DRUPAL 7 VERSION

Led by the excellent coding work of George Katsitadze (geokat), the Drupal 7 version of the module includes:

Login and Registration

Allow site visitors to register and login with one of their existing accounts at popular third-party websites.  Support is included for both the Drupal user login block and the user login page. Quickly and easily converting anonymous site visitors into active registered users.

Data Mapping

With permission of the user, you can map third-party user profile data to specific Drupal fields. A variety of fields are now supported, including User fields, old-style core Profile fields (for those upgrading from Drupal 6), and Profile2 module fields.

Import Profile Picture

You can instantly import a user's profile picture from a third-party site and use it as the user's Drupal profile picture.

Social Sharing

Make it easy for users to share their Drupal content and comments with friends and followers on other social networks. A "Share" button or link may be included on specific content types, which triggers the Janrain Engage social sharing widget. When a user submits a comment, this widget can be automatically triggered (suggesting to the user that he/she should share the comment).

Linked Account Management

A "Linked accounts" tab is now provided to the end user (who has the appropriate module permission). Using this tab, a user can add, remove, or otherwise manage the third-party accounts connected to his/her Drupal site account.

Rules Integration

For those using the popular Rules module, you can configure the full range of Rules-based actions to occur (change a role, send an e-mail, etc.) whenever a user adds or removes a third-party linked account via Janrain Engage.

Better yet, we've re-written the code to be more modular:  Just enable the features that you need.

TRY IT OUT. . . AND GET INVOLVED

We've recently released a 7.x-1.0-beta1 version of the module and would love to get your suggestions, bug reports, feature requests, and general feedback.

To make it easy for you to check out the module's capabilities, we've got the latest stable code up and running on the following demo site:

http://plugins.janrain.com/drupal7

You can login both as a regular Drupal site user and as an administrative user (so that you can see the module configuration settings, too).

If you'd rather just quickly look over more screenshots (including all of the configuration settings), you can do so here:

http://plugins.janrain.com/drupal7/?q=screenshots

And feel free to leave a comment on this blog post or else I'll see you in the issue queue!

Over the past few months, I've put a lot of work into the Drupal 7 version of the Userpoints module. Using the module, you can award or deduct points for user participation on your site. Combined with some cool recognition or prizes, the module can help provide a strong incentive for your users to get involved.

Led by the excellent coding work of Berdir (Sascha Grossenbacher), we've totally revamped the user interface, added tons of new features, and cleaned up a lot of the bugs in the Drupal 6 version. So I thought I'd take a moment to point out some of the most noticeable changes and how it can enhance your points-driven website.

For those of us with a bit more Drupal experience, it is easy to forget that most Drupal newcomers don't automatically know where to go to find a certain configuration screen or settings page.

And given that Drupal 7 changed the default paths to many notable administration pages, it's more important than ever to make it easy for Drupal newbies to get where they need to go after installing a module (especially if the module's README.txt file is not particularly up to date).

If you have more than a few Drupal contributed modules on your site (especially ones related to enhanced user features), you may soon discover that a bunch of modules want to add content to the user account page.

With the Drupal.org Git Migration just around the corner, more than a few Drupal community members are going to need to get Git installed on their Red Hat or CentOS server. Even though Git isn't included by default, there's an easy way to install it from the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository.

To do so, just type the following commands (assuming you're using RHEL 5.x or CentOS 5.x):

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm'


su -c 'yum install git'


One of the things that is most daunting when you install a feature-rich contributed module is the sheer number of settings and options that might be found on the module's main configuration pages. In many cases, the description of each setting is limited and documentation is scarce. It's probably going to take more than a few minutes to really understand the purpose of each setting.