Inside Sparkle*Shelf

We’ve just improved the activity feeds on the site. Activity feeds are a great way for members to discover other members and new features on site and have become and important part of Sparkle*Shelf.

One of the great things about Drupal is how active the community is. We installed an earlier version of the Activity Module last summer and it was a nice addition to the site. It was fairly crude to begin with, but did the job of letting people know what was going on around the site.

Recently, we noticed that the developers on the project have been quite busy adding new features and fixing bugs, and we decided to upgrade to the latest (and still in development) version of the module. Some of the features we’re most pleased with are

• Privacy: users can now opt out of having their activity appearing in the activity feed
• One-click delete: admins and activity authors can now delete activity items (no more need to delete things in the database!)
• Themeable display: we’re able to add nice icons and change the look and feel of both activity blocks and the activity page (see http://sparkleshelf.com/activity)
• Much improved admin interface – it is now far easier to manage the messages that are displayed in the feed.

Here’s how it looks now:

There are still some glitches, like the built in feature to avoid duplicate actions (if you update a post three times in a row, for instance), but overall we’re extremely happy and grateful for the work done by the Activity project team.