Talking Drupal #432 - Portals & Community Websites

Today we are talking about Portals, Community Websites, and
Drupal with guest Ron Northcutt. We’ll also cover Private Message
as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
www.talkingDrupal.com/432
Topics

Why are you passionate about community sites

Different types of portals you’ve worked on

Common features

Why is Drupal a great fit

Why would you choose Drupal over a Saas or PaaS

What is unique about each community

How important is UX

What common content models do you see

Most important tip

Resources

Lego sorting

https://news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=709

https://brickarchitect.com/guide/bricks/



PHPBB

discourse

Open Social

Monday

Guests

Ron Northcutt - community.appsmith.com rlnorthcutt
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu


Module name/project name:

Private Message



Brief description:

Have you ever wanted to include a full-fledged, ajaxified
system for private messages between users on your Drupal
site? There’s a module for that



Brief history

How old: created in Apr 2017 by Jaypan, a fellow
Canadian, but the most recent release is by Lucas Hedding,
who hails from Nicaragua, and is a prolific contrib
maintainer in his own right

Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta18 and 3.0.0 versions
available, the latter of which works with D9 and 10



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release in Oct 2023

Number of open issues: 130, 4 of which are bugs on the
3.0.x branch

Test coverage



Documentation: does have a handbook, though the pages seem to
date back to 2017, so hopefully the installation and setup hasn’t
changed too much since then

Usage stats:

Almost 2,000 sites

Maintainer(s):



Module features and usage

With the Private Message module installed, users on your
site can have permissions-based access to send private
messages to each other

Messages and threads are fieldable entities, and in
general the module is made to be highly configurable, so you
can tailor it to meet your site’s specific needs

That includes the frequency for asynchronous operations
like loading new messages, which can be done without a full
page refresh. There’s also a companion module to use Node.js
for the asynchronous operations, to reduce load on both the
browser and the server

That also allows for browser push notifications, or you
can use the integration with the Message module to send
notifications via email, SMS, and more, including aggregating
the notifications into digests

Companies often have a dedicated messaging solution like
Slack or Teams that they use internally, but this can be a
good solution for an extranet or vendor portal, where the
users may represent a variety of organizations

It’s also worth mentioning that both Private Message and
Message are included in the Open Social distribution, so that
could be a way to try out a preconfigured setup