Is there a way to filter your Events and Registration by a GroupId or UserId so that it can be integrated with Active Social? My intent would be to provide a calendar for each group in Active Social.

Maybe I don't need a filter. Would I just need to install an Event and Registration module for each group? That would mean I would need a hidden page for every Group in my Social Networking site. So that might not work either.

Let me know what you think the options are and if anyone else has approached you about using this product with Active Social.

Thanks.

Cliff

One idea I've been thinking about is a simple relationship between an event and friends and/or groups. When adding an event (assuming an Active Social integration) you could ask the user "who can see this event" and give them a list of checkboxes:

[ ] Just Me
[ ] My Friends
[ ] My Groups
[ ] Group A
[ ] Group B
[ ] Group C

Then, using a companion module to show groups, you could filter on groups id or user id and show only those events that match the viewing user's relationship selected by the event owner.

Meant to post this option:

[ ] Everyone
[ ] Just Me
[ ] My Friends
[ ] My Groups
[ ] Group A
[ ] Group B
[ ] Group C


PS - Can you change the display on your Active Forum to use Display Name instead of username? Since you auto register people who purchase on snowcovered using their email address - it's sort of a bad idea to expose email addresses on your forums. I get enough spam from email harvesters as it is....

1. Okay, changed to use Display Name now.

2. Yes, there are people asking for integration but more on the Smart-Thinker module.

3. I can consider adding such feature for both Smart-Thinker and Active Social, on the condition that someone can work along with me for your social networking site. I can customize to your needs for free if it is reasonable.

If you are keen, please contact gary by email. thanks.

Thank you for changing to display name!

I understand on the Smart Thinker since it's been out longer and is free. However, it's pretty much a community project now and even Rodney has been moving to Active Social (in bits and pieces)

I'll be happy to work with you. I'm an Enterprise Customer with Active Modules and do a lot of feature work, beta testing as it is. I also have a good relationship with Will. I currently run two networks - one on Active Social and another on Smart Thinker (but scheduled to move to Active Social in August). Lastly, I'm also a developer/consultant but try really hard to not develop anything any more since there are so many nice modules out there now.

I'm keen and I'm sure many more are too. I'll send you an email with some ideas/details.

Sounds good.

Can I conclude there are more users using Active Social rather than Smart-Thinker? I always thought Smart Think is the leading module in social sites in DNN...

I don't know if there are more users on one over the other. I can say that Active Social has been gaining popularity and is well developed and well supported by Active Modules. Smart Thinker is great and I used it for a long time - but Rodney pretty much stopped development on it as a commercial module set.

Okay. Steven,

I got your email, and I will read through it and do some research on the Active Social before I get back to you early next week.

For me personally, I would need to be able to create one page for the User Calendars and one page for the Group Calendars. Then just drop one instance of the Event Cal and use the Active Social Integration to consume each page by a user or a group and have their events filtered by ActiveSocialUserID or ActiveSocialGroupID. At least that is how I have implemented other erd party tools like Ventrian News Articles, Ultra media Gallery, etc.

I could setup a quick test site for you but the AS demo license is only good for a few weeks. So you would have to be prepared to work on this. Also, it might be best to wait a couple of weeks until Active Forums 4.2 comes out and the next version of Active Social 1.1.3.

Just my $0.02

Cliff

Cliff, thanks for sharing.

I will contact you when we start development on this for more details.

Active Social is definitely the way to go - it is the only supported, enterprise class product that is under active development.

Another design to consider:

My Profile Calendar Event Creation - calendar placed on all profile pages. Ability to set some events as "private" so they are not shared.
Ability to filter (include or exclude) events from specific friends and groups.
The calendar would show aggregated calendar events from a) all my friends (exclusion filter option) b) all my groups (exclusion filter option) and c) for my own personal events. This method would only require setting up the filtering only one time. This would allow me to block some group / member events, but I don't have to leave the group or drop the friend to do so.

Group Calendar Event Creation - calendar placed on all group pages.
Would group administrator have ability to review group events before they go live?

The benefits of this design is that you only need to set your exclusion filter once. The downside is that may need to manually post the same event to multiple groups (if it applies to more than one group). This could result in multiple event notices for anyone who belongs to the multiple groups where the same event is posted.

If you want to include me in your design and testing I would gladly help.

I have a client who is interested in this functionality. Any estimate on when this might be released?

Thanks,
Chris

Chris,

Thanks for sharing on this, and it is our goal to help our users to develop solutions to solve real problems like what you mentioned.

I will keep you updated on this status, but you should take note this may take a while like 2 month to put things together.

Thanks.

Add me to the list of people who REALLY NEED something like this!

Joe,

Great to know that.

I'm also interested, as I'm actively building a community and need tools that are supported and even people that will take money to move the modules forward.

Daniel,

It is in our pipeline to integrate with such social networking sites as well..

I just downloaded an evaluation of the Event Calendar and Registration module to my development environment. It looks by far to be the closest thing to what I need.

I too need to integrate this with Active Social. I am going to see if I can use Will's module loader, but any updates, movement or suggestions you can make on this would be great. Or if you need me to help answer some of the basics about how Active Social works, I would be more than happy to.

Thanks

Many users expressed interest in Active Social integration, we will work on this in stages.

For the immediate one, we will integrate with Active Social User profile page.

Cliff and all,

I have questions as I am trying to integrate Active Social for you guys, hope you can share your ideas as you are more familiar with that module.

In the EC&R module, it allows multiple attendees, and the names and attendee data are provided by the person who registers the event, so the attendee may/or may not be a user on the website, it means, the attendee may/or may not have a profile in the Active Social module.

I am adding a token to render a list of attendees for the event.

Question, what is the best way to link each attendee to the respective Active Social profile?
There is no user ID associated with each attendee, only first name, last name, and other data.

As this topic is getting lengthy, you may want to start a new tread for this?

If you do, please be sure to post the link here as many people are following this thread.

Thanks,
Chris

For our use, we want to see a list of text links to the userprofile page. I understand that the userid may not be recorded, even of the registrant, but as the admin, I'like to be able to add the userid IF IT IS AVAILABLE - even after the registration process. See, people that will register for an event (without registering on the site to get a userid) can be encouraged by their name showing up WITHOUT a text link (or a thumbnail), while those with a userid have their profile linked to. People generally respond to 'loss' rather than 'opportunity' so if we remind them that they are left out (everyone else has a profile linked) then they are much more likely to register in dnn.

I also believe that the free smart-thinker modules will be a bit more popular to integrate with, since we have to pop $400 for AS. This said, I believe the userid (ASuserID?) tokens are similar, true?

what is the best way to link each attendee to the respective Active Social profile?

I think automation of this is cool, but admin over-witing/correcting it is a first step and an eventual necessity.

I would think that the list would either be two part (one for the registered attendees and one for the nonregistered attendees) or the link would either point to their profile or not link anywhere if they are not a member.

For a true integration, I suggest we can to do it this way:

This should work with both Active Social, and Smart Thinker as well.

1. When user registers for an event, a list users should be available for them to enroll. (a list of friends i think)

2. In this way, the user profile page is certainly available for those attendees selected from the frineds list.

3. It also retain the current function, allow user to enter any attendees without registered as a user. So for such attendees, no profile link shall be provided.

What do you guys think?

If anyone is interested, I have put together a simple loader for the Active Social group to load from a module instance on another page. This example is not the most elegant. It should do a database lookup to determine which module instance to load.

Also if you have a lot of groups with calendars this will become labor intensive. After I add teh database lookup, for my purposes it works fine.

I could not get the Events Calendar to work within the Active Social group because they both rely of the querystring. However, I did get the Satellite module to work. In my scenerio, I setup a series of Calendars and satellite modules on separate pages that allow the group managers to manage their calendars and serve as the primary page for that calendar. I also have a Main calendar that rolls them all up.

Within the Group you can see the list of events. When you click on the item it then takes you to that item on their calendar page.

Again, this is not going to solce the integration problem, but if you are technically comfortable and you need a short solution, this might help.

raymond, what you proposed is another good solution.

How about the simple integration I suggested for the attendees and user profiles?

To further integrate, the following should also be done:

1. To allow sharing of events with friends, or everyone, or by group. (as suggested By Cliff's example)

2. Additional module to show friends's events, and My events

3. Add lines to story feed. (e.g. xxx added a new event)

Please let me know if that's enough.

For my current applications, #1 is not something I would want. At the moment my focus is on group owners creating events and letting their group members register. As long as this is an option as it is now for an event, that's fine. I can see where it might be useful to others.

The rest make sense. I especially like the idea of a module to see My Events. When you say add line to story feed, I assume that in Active Social parlance that is a Journal entry. I like that too.

I had another question about the module that lead me to another opportunity for integration. I'll keep this message to integration.

Active Social has a private messaging system. They just opened the API to allow you to send a message to users through that system. What I like about it is that the recipient decides whether they want messages forwarded to their email or not. It would be great if we could select whether any of the messages coming from the calendar goes to their email address or the AS messaging system. I think this would be an admin decision. We want people to come to the site and make their own decisions about how much messaging comes outside the portal.

For non-registered users, you could just send to their email address as you do now.

I think that Smart Thinker has this same type of functionality.

I can understand the group invitation and list functions, and agree these could be useful, however, my first need to to attract non-registered (non-dnn users) people to attend an event by seeing that other people (like themselves) are signing up for the event. These are workshops, from which we want to build a network of social groups.

So, all I need is to
A) list registrants of each event
B) link the registrant to a profile page if it is available

Daniel,

That is the feature we are currently building.

Thanks.

Sounds like this is really coming along...We are also very interested in this integration with AS. Is there an ETA on first release?

Sounds like many are interested in Active Social, but I am still working with Smart Thinker.

It looks like AS does not provide a trial copy?

We have one installation of active social, and about 6 others on Smart-thinker, so you can see which is more useful to us to start with.

Hi,
We are using AS on several sites and would be very interested in seeing your product integrated.

Our requirements are quite simple (I think). We need a solution for our AS members to be able to register for events with no charge/fee whereas non-members would register for the event and pay.

Whether this is integrated through AS or not would not be my primary concern but would be a bonus if this is possible.

Thanks,
Pat

Pat,

I already answered your question on the other tread.
The answer is Yes.

Btw, the new version now integrates with Smart-Thinker, it is a simple integration though:

1. Allow user to RSVP
2. Allow displaying a list of attendees, and link to their Smart-Thinker profile (optional, can be turned off)
3. Post story-feed to their wall when Adding, RSVP to an event.

v3.0 user should be able to get it within days when it is released, and I will gather some feedback on this them add more features to it.
Once it is matured, we will then integrate it with Active Social as well.

For those who are willing to try it out, I also attached it here for you to download before it is released. :)
Thanks.

Hi,

Did any of you guys try the new v3.1 with integration with Smart-Thinker?

If you have any feedback, please let me know soonest, so that we can make it available for you, we will do the same for Active Social as well.

Thanks.

Hi ...

Was there ever any integration made between
Events Calendar & Active Social?

I would love to have this feature.

:w00t:

Trent,

Currently it only has profile integration with Smart Social.

We will add Active Social soon with an update.

Is there an estimated release date for the Active Social Integration?

I'm interested in integration with Active Social as well. I haven't made the purchase but I have been following it for a while now and intend to at some point.

Dave,

Sure, this is also in our working list... we will try to make it as soon as possible.

Gary,

The easiest way to do this would be to expose a view in the My Events module which allowed you to specify the tag in the query string to look for.

For example, Active Social is ASUID. It would then look for any events created by that user.

This has been done successfully in Ultra Video Gallery and Sun Blog Nuke. It'd be great to also handle Group events but this could be left out of the first hit ...
The link to profile functionality can also be relatively easily done, simply call their DNN profile page.



Also, on a separate but related note, is there an easy way to change event owner like the DNN core events module? There, someone with Edit permissions on the module can simply select a new event owner from a dropdown box. It's possibly the one thing missing.

Cheers,

Matt

Also worth noting that Will is sharing details for posting to the journal to module developers - would be good to see this too.

Hi, Matt,

Currently can do so with My Events module.
the parameter to pass in will be "uid", this is the UserID value to pass in.

Just tested loading it in a tab. It loads the current user's events, not the user being listed. And you'd want to be able to configure uid or asuid, or anything else, so it can be used with other modules too.

This might be a better illustration of what other modules do : http://www.sunblognuke.com/Support/Forums/forumid/2/threadid/509/scope/posts.aspx

Matt,

We will take a look at this...

Thanks. It'd be great to effectively replace the ActiveSocial events functionality with Invenmanager's, for a unified event calendar :-)

Matt,

It appears the version that can accept "uid" parameter is not uploaded for download yet.

As you suggested, we will make it configurable to accept any other parameters as user id. so you can choose UID, or asuid or whatever you want.

Thanks Gary.

Also, I've had some thought and also done some checking on the ActiveModules site, and I think I see a way to do group integration with ActiveSocial too.

This would be an additional mode for the My Events module - let's call it "Custom group querystring".

In this mode, the My Events module would display a "New Event" icon if the user has permissions within Invenmanager. When clicked, it will pass the group ID- which is identified by the querystring parameter "asg"- to Invenmanager. From this point on, event creation will occur as per normal.

The My Events module will then use the "asg" parameter display any events created for the group, while in this mode.

Once the ActiveSocial journal api details are available, you could also use the asg parameter to post to the group journal.

Hope this makes some sense :-)

Cheers,

Matt

Matt,

Yes, it makes sense. I think this feature deserves to be a separate module that integrates with Active Social and Events Calendar.

Are you interested to develop it?

Thanks Gary. I'm no developer myself, but would be happy to help out wherever I can :-)