25 June 2013, 7:37

I've looked the forums over and haven't found that anyone has asked this question yet (though I won't discount possibly missing that): we would like to "extend" the Wall functionality to include multiple micro-blogging threads ala Facebook's timeline...is this possible? I know the Forums provide a means of facilitating many-to-many conversations, but having a "Public Wall" block whereby 'friends' can converse in real-time would be a big plus for our environment.

thanks,

Jeff 

26 June 2013, 8:25

Hello Jeff,

Everything is possible. :-) It hasn't been done yet as far as I know from what's been posted in the forums or on the tracker.

Cheers

Kristina

28 June 2013, 8:53

Thank you Kristina. It would seem to me that this would be a logic step to extend the functionality of the Wall and make it more realtime interactive and facilitate many-to-many networking.

best, Jeff

30 October 2013, 2:47

Hi, this is a very useful function. We're looking for create a "Social Moodle" so we would to integrate Moodle+Mahara.

With this new function it will be a good start point.
Cheers,

Alfredo

28 June 2013, 10:01

Yeah, currently the Wall is basically a single, special comment thread. To make something more like the Facebook Timeline, I think you'd need the following:

1. A new "Timeline" block to display notifications about content created by your Friends & Groups. This might be facilitated by a new Notification plugin, since the Notification plugin infrastructure (which we use for emails and site inbox) already does the necessary subscription/notification logic.

2. The ability to enter Facebook-style "status updates". This would probably best be done as a new "microblogging" artefact type... although, you'd hit a snag with the Mahara access control model if you did that. Currently, artefacts only become visible to other users when they're embedded in a Page which is made visible. So, we'd have to do some careful thinking about how we'd want to handle these microblog artefacts... I'm currently working on a change to the access control system to allow Pages to belong to more than one Collection, and potentially that could help with this.

3. In addition, Facebook can examine the types of contents a user drops into a status update and determine different kinds of updates to create. It mostly does this by looking for OpenGraph meta tags on the sites whose URLs are dropped in; it can also detect images and videos dropped onto the screen. In Mahara terms, this would mean that the "Timeline Block" would be able to analyze the content you enter and decide what kind of artefact to make. We were actually doing a little bit of work towards something like this, on the Page creation screen, but ran out of time to implement it.

4. The ability to post status updates on other people's Walls (and then have it show up in their timeline). This would again pose some access control questions.

Anyway, as Kristina said, it's definitely implementable, and some of the infrastructure you'd need is already present in Mahara. But I'm not aware of anyone working on it right now.

Cheers,
Aaron

28 June 2013, 11:31

Thanks for the very detailed analysis. And yes, everything IS possible, given time and resources. So, perhaps this will work its way into the roadmap at some future date. We're new to Mahara and definitely on the configuring/implementing side rather than the development side so I'm afraid we'd be of little help.

best, Jeff 

30 June 2013, 14:16

Hello Jeff,

I created a wishlist item on the tracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1196171 so it doesn't get lost and referenced this discussion here.

Cheers

Kristina

01 July 2013, 9:20

super...thank you for doing this Kristina

ciao, Jeff