SocialConnections

Enables

Social connections between people and things: list of friends, things you like, stuff you recommend.
Activities on those things which are recorded for later processing
Digest mechanism to digest those activities, e.g. for daily digest emails.

This gem is work in progress and my playground, use at own risk.

Setup

Install as a gem

gem install social_connections

or reference in your Gemfile

gem 'social_connections'

and run

bundle install

Next, you need to add the migration by using the install generator of the gem:

rails g social_connections:install

which adds the required migration(s). Doing a migration will generate the required tables:

rake db:migrate

Now, every model that is supposed to act as a connectable thing (so that friends can connect other friend or users can like books, or similar), add to all those models

acts_as_connectable :verbs => [ :likes, :recommends, :comments ]

where the verbs specify what you want to allow those connectables to do to other connectables. See the example below, that may make it clearer.

Example

Users can like books, and they can comment on books.

Enable model User to be connected to other users and things (books, in this example):

acts_as_connectable :verbs => [ :likes, :comments ]

Given a user u and a book b, you can now say

u.likes(b)

and

u.comments(b, :comment => 'awesome book!')

. This creates activities for the user and the book. Activities are only created for those connected to the subject and/or object of the activity--in the example, user u is the subject and book b is the object. A user v can connect to user u by saying

v.connect_to(u)

. If this is issued before invoking likes and comments as above, user v receives 2 activities.

These activities can be queried:

b.likes_by_count

Gives the number of users (or other 'connectables') that liked this book. Same for

b.comments_by_count

. For more examples, see the spec files.

Controllers for Activities

Assuming that current_user gives you the currently logged in user, a controller responding to a 'like' button could look as follows:

  class CurrentUserLikesController < ApplicationController
    def likes_book
      @book = Book.find(params[:id])
      current_user.likes(@book) unless current_user.likes?(@book)
    end
  end

A route in config/routes.rb might then look as follows:

match '/current_user_likes_book/:id' => 'current_user_likes#likes_book', :as => :current_user_likes_book

The view (e.g. app/views/books/show.html.erb) may then contain the following 'like' button:

<%= link_to('I like this', current_user_likes_book_path(@book) %>

Views

A list of social activities can be rendered by

<%= render @social_activities %>

in a view. Thereby, '@social_activities' could have been assigned in a controller like this:

def show
  @user = User.find(params[:id])
  @social_activities = SocialConnections.aggregate(@user).activities
end

Rendering uses a generic partial (part of the gem) which in turn renders the subject and target as partial, and the verb as text. If the subject is of type 'User', then you have to provide a partial in 'app/views/users/_user.html.erb' (if using erb). Check Rails Guides on partials on details for this. A simple example for a '_user.html.erb' file is:

User <%= link_to user.name, user %>

If you want to use your own template for rendering the SocialActivity, you can pass a reference to your template as an option when creating the activity:

u.comments(b, :comment => 'awesome book!', :template => 'social_activities/user_comments_user')

For this, provide a partial at 'app/views/social_activities/_user_comments_user.html.erb'.

How to run the Tests (in the gem itself, not in your Rails app)

Run specs in ./spec:

rspec --color spec