How to create something like friendship requests, similar to Facebook

help
1

Say we have a social media app were users login and make posts. The user data is published so we can see individual user profiles. How do we go about making a system that adds users as friends, like in facebook; or followers , like Twitter?

Three approaches so far.

First approach was to find an online tutorial of someone creating a social media app, like Facebook or Twitter. All the ones I came across were using older versions of Meteor before 1.2. Or were sing autopublish and insecure. I like to start my mornings doing a Meteor tutorial or video, but it looks like I am running out of advanced ones.

Tried looking on atmosphere for packages, but couldnt find one with a tutorial explaining how to use it.

Plan C being make my own package from scratch. In my mind the hardest part is making buttons, but I guess they can be text buttons and later get a designer to make better ones.

So lets say the collection is called friendRequests. We need to take the id of user that is being sent a request, id of user sending, and its status. Status being pending or accepted.

UserB pushes a request button on userA page. A document is created looking something like this.
requestTo: userAID
requestFrom: userBID
status: p

If accepted the status is changed to A. If denied the document is just deleted.

Is this how other people do it?

I havent started coding. Just planning things out.

2

I’d store friends/followers data in a separate collection, but is there a reason to do this for friend requests?

3

in the way i mapped out, the friendsRequests become the collection for followers.

4

Everything you need is available using https://atmospherejs.com/socialize/friendships and almost any other social feature is available as a package under the same organization https://atmospherejs.com/socialize/

If you have issues, let me know and I’ll see about helping you get started.

1 Like
5

i watched your video before and didnt get it working.

6

thinking of making an array to collect id of connections.

7

ok so ended with a collection of userConnections.click event.

sample of my help during an

var userConnectFrom= Meteor.userId();
var userConnectTo = this._id;

my call to the server it inset it into the collection works. but so far userConnectTo is blank. the result in my database is no field. just UserConnectFrom is there.

8

so far quick and dirty. a collection storing two usernames. got as far as displaying all connections and blocking the connect button if connection already made. next is to try remove from to disconnect.

9

mission completed. adds connections, displays on profile and disconnects.easy and dirty which can be improved later.
if someone wants to login and tell us what they think.
http://www.subpattern.com/