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Newsfeed to show every site activity, not just ones in your groups | Forum

Topic location: Forum home » Support » General Questions
Rob
Rob Apr 2 '15
My site is new and small. In order to stimulate activity, good practise is to highlight any activity that happens (e.g. in Jive you have the Activity Stream which shows everything any member does in a public group, regardless of whether the user is following the other member or in the same group). This is a really good step for small communities.


Is there a way for me to do this in Oxwall? The Dashboard newsfeed only shows stuff the user has done. The Main page newsfeed shows generic things but not everything. Any ideas?

Musik
Musik Apr 13 '15
Hey, Rob. I created a site much like you described. I run a tight-knit community and it was essential that the Dashboard show all user activity, plus activity for the Groups my users subscribed to. Here's how I went about doing it:


1. I customized the Dashboard to look identical to the Index page. This means enabling certain widgets to work on the Dashboard if they don't already. I can provide some tips on how to do this.


2. I updated the site menu with 2 conditional "Main" (AKA "Home) links. The first "Main" leads to the Index and is only visible to logged-out users, the second "Main" leads to the Dashboard and is only visible to logged-in users. By doing it this way, Oxwalls core programming also makes it so when you log in, the default redirect URL is the customized Dashboard you set up to look like the Index page.


3. I made everyone friends with everybody. I did this using Puru's Friendship For All plugin. This ensures that every user's site activity appears on the customized Dashboards.


The end result is everyone can see every user and activity in groups that they joined on their Newsfeed. On the front end, it appears seamless to the user despite the fact they're looking at two different Newsfeeds.


As for also seeing posts in groups they haven't joined, I didn't go that far and I'm unsure how you'd go about that other than make every user join every group. But if you have any questions from anything I wrote out, let me know. More than happy to assist as you figure this out.

The Forum post is edited by Musik Apr 13 '15
dave Leader
dave Apr 13 '15
How detailed are you talking about?   Are you feeding when someone looks at an image, or changes the page, or looks at chat, or posts a chat message, or presses the submit button. 


If you go that detailed i would advise you let people know upfront and have a very very good privacy policy and TOS.  


FB has ticked off alot of members by tracking too much activity in the past and even now is walking a thin line.  

Rob
Rob Apr 14 '15
@dave: I don't want that much detail. All I want is for "added content" to be shown by default. I use a lot of Groups in my installation, so basically I want the generic Main newsfeed to include:

photos added
videos added
stuff posted into a forum in any group that is open
stuff posted on a wall in any group that is open

Regardless of whether the person looking at the Main newsfeed is in those groups.

@Musik: that's a neat workaround. I'm relying on Groups though, so I'm not sure that would work for me. I'd prefer not to make everyone Friend everyone else. I rather assumed there would be a plugin somewere that did this: it's really generic social network functionality so presumably there's a market for it (and I'm guessing it's very simple, except possibly if permissions are involved).
dave Leader
dave Apr 14 '15
Do you have everything checked (selected) in your newsfeed content settings?
Musik
Musik Apr 14 '15

Rob, I genuinely can't think of a plugin what would do that by default, at least not in the Newsfeed. Best of luck trying to work through this one. I'd be curious to see what you come up with when it's said and done.


Quote from Rob
@Musik: that's a neat workaround. I'm relying on Groups though, so I'm not sure that would work for me. I'd prefer not to make everyone Friend everyone else. I rather assumed there would be a plugin somewere that did this: it's really generic social network functionality so presumably there's a market for it (and I'm guessing it's very simple, except possibly if permissions are involved).