Related user activity stream

Now that our users can connect with other users, and start to build a truly social network, we need to provide streams of information which relate to these connections. The heartbeat module can help us with just that; it's an extensible module which provides useful streams of activity, and comes with basic support, out of the box, for the User Relationships module.

Depending on the relationship type, we would want the stream to display a different message, for example:

• Jack and Jill are now friends

• Jack is now following Jill

This will involve us:

• Creating a template for heartbeat to inform users of the relationship in their stream

• Creating a new rule to detect when a relationship is approved (we don't want to add the relationship to the stream until it has been approved) and to send notification to heartbeat

A template for each relationship type

Let's start by creating a heartbeat template for the friend relationship; we need to go to Administer | Structure | Heartbeat...