Submitted by dave on Mon, 2009-01-19 18:41.

The Drupal for Facebook project has come a long way in the past year. But it is an ongoing challenge to keep up with new APIs from Facebook, and also new versions of Drupal.

I'm looking for sponsors to pay me (or another person if that makes sense) to implement several features, and to support the project in general. These items are non-trivial - you can see the amounts I hope to raise below. My hope is that the companies using Drupal for Facebook can share the expense. Please do contact me if you are interested. I will credit you on the project's sponsors page and in the project issue queue. The community will thank you greatly.

Release 1.0 on Drupal 6.x

New features are still being added to the 5.x branch, so I have postponed the creation of a 6.x branch because of the added overhead it would entail. My goal is to release a version 1.0 of DFF for D6 before the DrupalCon in March. (A portion of the devel release is already ported to D6, see the patch in the issue queue).

Issue Queue: http://drupal.org/node/235457

I hope to raise US $5000 or more to support this. If in addition I can raise money for the features below, they will be included in the 1.0 release.

Facebook Connect Support

This would allow users to log into Drupal sites with their Facebook username and password; providing an alternate login similar to OpenID. (See a prototype of this on http://www.drupalforfacebook.org.) It would also make the site aware of the user's social graph. For example, showing recent posts by the user's facebook friends. And it would allow activity on the site to be published to the user's news feed and profile on Facebook.

Issue Queue: http://drupal.org/project/issues/178857/term/448

I hope to raise US $5000 or more to support Facebook Connect.

Ease of Use Improvements

Drupal for Facebook is relatively tricky to install and configure. For example to configure an Application you must learn its apikey from Facebook, then copy that value to Drupal, then copy a callback URL and several other values from Drupal back to Facebook. Facebook has introduced APIs to automate much of this, and I'd like the modules to start using them, as well as several other ease of use issues.

Issue Queue: http://drupal.org/node/360334

I hope to raise US $3000 or more to support ease of use.

Allow User Name and Login Name to be different

This would be a new feature for Drupal, useful for many reasons. But for Facebook in particular it is important because Facebook user names are not unique (they are peoples' real names), but Drupal user names must be unique. So if you application has two users named John Smith, Drupal is not able to show their names properly.

Issue Queue: http://drupal.org/node/188734#comment-865795, http://drupal.org/node/102679#comment-872755

I hope to raise US $5000 or more to support this. It's a change to Drupal core which will be time consuming and challenging to push through.

Access Control Based on Social Network

Drupal has an access control model making it possible to hide content or give extra privileges based on taxonomy terms and other attributes. This feature would provide access control based on a user's Facebook account. So for example a node could be made visible only to friends of the author. Or editable only by members of a Facebook Group or Network.

I hope to raise US $5000 or more to support this.

Notifications Framework Integration

When a user logs in via fbConnect or a canvas page, Drupal does not learn their email address. But the Facebook APIs provide other ways to send them messages. Development Seed has introduced a Notifications Framework which has been embraced by several third party modules, and it makes sense for DFF to leverage this.

I hope to raise US $3000 or more to support Notifications.

Documentation

In part because the features of DFF have changed quickly and in part because there is simply no time, I have put very little time into documenting the Drupal for Facebook project. For the 1.0 release I hope to have a much improved handbook on Drupal.org, and an improved slide show for presenting the project at conferences.

I hope to raise at least US $3000 to support this.

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