Quick Update on statusbook

Hi everyone,
Thought I’d send out a quick update on the progress of statusbook.

What I’m currently working on:
I’ve spend the last little while trying to come up with an elegant solution to the privacy (permission) part of the module. As you may well know, Drupal has its own permission setting which can be controlled from the back end. What I’m trying to do is allow each user to control who can access certain content created by the user. For example “Friends Only” or “Fans” ..etc.

You programmers out there are probably thinking …. Why not check permission before displaying the content. That does kind of work but what about teaser views? Currently statusbook utilizes the hook_view() hook to check permission and display accordingly. This is not the proper way of doing it as it actually doesn’t really work when a page is just displaying the teaser, it also messes up pagers.

New Solution is to use node_access via grants and relms -> I’ve made good progress and looks like statusbook will be able to utilize this method. This method is closely related to the nodeaccess modules but is tided into the friend module of statusbook.

Once this is implemented and tested, it won’t be a long stretch to allow users to create “friend groups” and assign rights based on those groups as well.

Again thank you to all those whom sent kind words to me about statusbook. I wish I had more time to spend on this little project.

cheers