Context
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
Drupal translations is a service, built on Drupal itself, that is used by translators from around the world to maintain localizations of all projects on http://drupal.org.
This document is a proposal for Gábor Hojtsy idea (with some extras!) to organize and expose in natural and automated way the massive activity happening under the hood on http://localise.drupal.org.
About the author
My name is Georgios Politis and I'm currently an undergraduate student at Faculty of Computer and Information sciences, University of Rennes I. In 2009 I participated in GSoC 09 with SIP Communicator where I worked on extending SIP Communicator with Off The Record (OTR) message encryption. In GSoC 10 I was a mentor of the SIP Communicator project.
My email address, which is my jabber id also, is "gp at superpointer dot com". My freenode handle is superpointer.
Motivation
This year I eagerly want to expose Drupal translation activity and add support for ActivityStreams. Adding value to the massive amount of information being stored on localize.drupal.org is like gold mining. The information is there waiting for us to extract it, which is pretty amazing.
Also, I want to see Drupal, this awesome platform/core/brain, being (re)used to implement a concept as compelling as ActivityStreams.
Overview
Its a definite characteristic of communities online and offline that seeing the momentum, the activity and work being done energizes others and moves them to contribute more, so exposing all this information is crucial.
Specifically for Drupal's localization service, helping people realize that they work in an active team, moderators to recognize contributions and better organize their work and translation users to have more data points to asses the quality of translation teams when related to certain projects, would boost growth and activity.
But getting activity logging/publishing right is important for another reason too.
There is a trend to expand from social network sites to social applications hosted on the social network site itself and social networking services capable of adding social context to productivity suites, collaboration tools, enterprise portals, business processes, and mobile applications.
By marking up social activities and social objects, delivered with the activity stream microformat, we could turn Drupal to a full fledged, sophisticated and configurable activity stream publisher interconnectable with other social networking sites or services.
To achieve the above two goals, this project has the following objectives:
- Build a new or modify an existing module(s) that would provide an Activity Logging API.
- Expose Drupal translation activity via activity graphs and on the site level.
- Add support for publishing activities using the ActivityStreams microformat.
Description
Logging Activities
Activity messages should be possible to generate based on user activity, without the user explicitly typing in any part of this message. Modules would have to capture interesting user activity and log it via the Activities Logging API.
In order to model the underlying storage of the API we need a definition of an Activity. Thankfully there already is a a good definition:
An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by someone or something (the actor) against some kind of person, place, or thing (the object). There may also be a target (like a photo album or wishlist) involved. [1].
Based on this definition we could model the API the following way:
Some notes about the model:
- modules can install their own verbs, objects and actors, that could be further categorized.
- it gives us the flexibility to group/partition activities by user, model, verb and/or object.
Existing modules that could serve as a basis for a new module or that could be modified to provide the desired functionality:
| Module | Description | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Activity | Allow users to see their friends' activity on the site. | |
| Heartbeat | Logs user activity when certain events occur, triggering actions. The logged data is accessable through views. The module includes predefined rules and views. | This module seems the most promising, it is user-centric though which is limiting. However, the idea is there, and we could extend this module or use it as a basis for this project. |
| Microactivity | Micro activity is a small module, depending on heartbeat that will show the micro stream of a user when for instance hovering over an avatar or username link. | |
| ActivityStream | Activity Stream builds a lifestream for you by aggregating your social activities all in one place. Whether it's bookmarks on Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, pictures on Flickr, music on Last.fm, or posts on your blog, anything you create can be gathered into one easy to read stream. | As its description suggests, it mostly does aggregation. |
| Message | A general logging utility that can be used as (yet another) activity module. | Needs investigation. |
Publishing/Displaying Activities
ActivityStreams
Activities will be published using the ActivityStreams microformat, the standardized method of representing human activity within an online status update.
The ActivityStreams microformat was originally formulated by Chris Messina. The stream in ActivityStreams is a feed of related activities for a given person or social object. Put together, ActivityStreams is a convenient and consistent way to syndicate social activities around the web. The Activity Streams format has already been adopted by MySpace, Windows Live, Google Buzz, BBC, Opera, TypePad, Gowalla, Gnip, Socialcast, Superfeedr, YIID, and many others.
For a broader high level overview of the concepts, take a look at these presentations.
Site level display
The activity will be visible on the site level (such as for announcements and new releases made available), and on the language group level (such as for the language and team specific activity messages).
To display a social objects activity on the site level we could use Views, like the heartbeat module does.
Activity Graphing
Showing the growth of teams over time, the submission and moderation activity via graphical means can expose really telling details about a team and would help moderators notice if suggestions outnumber active translations, for translators to see that others are active on the team and energize them to keep contributing.
Translation activity could be exposed via Sparklines. There are a few possible ways to generate the necessary charts.
- Sparkline-aware views display plugin.
- Charts API.
- The Quant module.
There is an interesting analysis on using sparklines to show the "Activity" for each project, which resembles to what we want to do here; show the activity for each team.
Localisation server activities
Examples of desired activity messages:
- Views 7.x-3.4 became available for translation
- Joe joined the German team
- Edith is now promoted to be administrator of the Italian team
- Josh left the Greek team
- Aaron submitted 6 new translations (in the past hour) for Pathauto, Views and Calendar in Danish
- Jill imported 354 suggestions for Views, Display Suite, Drupal commerce, Drupal and 14 other projects in Korean
- Dana approved 23 translations and declined 9 suggestions (in the past hour) for Date and Panels in Estonian
- Announcement: new moderation functionality available (link)
More formally, this could be modeled the following way:
| actor (by someone or something) | verb (action that was performed) | time (instant in time) | object (against some kind of person, place, or thing) |
|---|---|---|---|
| l10n_server | Views 7.x-3.4 became available for translation | ||
| Joe | joined | the German team | |
| Edith | promoted to be administrator | 1301802533 (2011-04-03 03:48:53Z, could display "now") | Italian team |
| Josh | left | 1301802533 | the Greek team |
| Aaron | submitted 6 new translations (in the past hour) in Danish | 1301802533 | for Pathauto, Views and Calendar |
| Jill | imported 354 suggestions in Korean | 1301802533 | for Views, Display Suite, Drupal commerce, Drupal and 14 other projects |
| Dana | approved 23 translations and declined 9 suggestions in Estonian | 1301802533 (could display "in the past hour") | for Date and Panels |
| l10n_server | new moderation functionality available (link) |
Planning
I purposely kept blank some weeks near the end of GSoC. They can be justified by the fact that I start working on April 25, and not May 23, which gives me 4 extra weeks of work. I plan to use them in case I'm off schedule.
| Week N° | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Week 1, Mon April 25 - Results announced | Evaluate modules that do activity logging. |
| Week 2, Mon May 2 | Modify an existing module or create a new module that would do activity logging. |
| Week 3 | Continue work on API. Start modifying i10_server module so as to capture interesting user activity. |
| Week 4 | Continue work on API and i10_server module. |
| Week 5 | Continue work on API and i10_server module. |
| Week 6 | Add Activity Logging configuration UI. Modify i10_server module to work with this new UI. |
| Week 7 | Continue work on Activity Logging config UI. |
| Week 8, Mon June 6 | Evaluate modules that do graphing, candidates are ... |
| Week 9 | Modify an existing module or create a new module that would do graphing. |
| Week 10 | Continue work on graphing. |
| Week 11 | Continue work on graphing. |
| Week 12, Mon July 4 | Continue work on graphing. |
| Week 13, Mon July 11 - Mentors and students can begin submitting mid-term evaluations | Finalize API, on site display and graphing. |
| Week 14 | Modify an existing module or create a new module that would do ActivityStream publishing. |
| Week 15 | |
| Week 16, Mon August 1 | |
| Week 17 | |
| Week 18 | |
| Week 19, Mon Aug 22 - Mentors, students and organization administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google |
Mentors
I don't have any mentors as of yet. I hope someone will be interested!
Puzzle
Question: If we know that isset($a) === empty($a) then what $a could be?
Answer: "", 0, "0", FALSE, array()