Hello there! This repo hasn't been updated in quite some time, if you're looking for example of up-to-date social apps with Meteor, check out this great tutorial with Meteor/Angular
Here comes Socialite. It implements classic features from facebook-like social networks, including:
- Profile
- Pictures
- Friends
- Messaging system
It is mostly a prototype. This project is for my own amusement, and because I wanted to play with the Meteor platform.
npm install -g meteorite(if not already installed)mrt
Should do it. It should download all dependencies then initialize the database.
You can tweak the fixtures.js file to add/remove questions/fake users (default fake users all reside in Hong Kong). Also copy the main.config.sample file to main.config.js and edit what you want.
The questions for users' profiles are stored in the database, with different custom template and validations. When a user update its profile, its inputs are checked against the question database and their validations. This ensure an easy and somehow secure way to administrate and render what is generally consider (at least by me) as a horrible pain in the neck.
It's all in Meteor, so everything is pretty much instantaneous, which is cool.
There should be some i18n support, but a lot of placeholders are missing (and some string are hardcoded), plus the lexicon is far from being complete. The logic is here though, and should allow for on-the-fly change of language, assuming more than one language should be made available.
There is a lot left to do and little time. Among the list:
- The setting page for user is pretty much non-existent.
- There is a commenting system, but it is not plugged anywhere.
- With more questions we could have a cool Profile Editing page.
- Would be cool to be able to like/+1 users' content and action.
- Add more user interactions, it's a bit dry right at the moment.
- Some design. Current one is pretty minimalist. The UI in general is pretty much only what Boostrap offers.
- Security might not be horrible, but it is certainly not good. User input are validated but not sanitized at the moment.
- I would love to write unit test for it, be it only to stabilize the API, but TDD with Meteor doesn't seem to be mature enough at the moment and I only found trivial case of testing.
API is a big word, but here are a few of the useful publications/collections/helpers/methods implemented in Socialite.
The current user data: full profile, settings and if the profile is completed (to be able to display the profile creation flow otherwise).
On-ready, sets the settings and profileComplete Session variable. to indicate that 1. the profile is loaded and 2. allow for easy access of those information.
All the current user Photos.
Notification for the current user, with potential related users (from Meteor.users -- if the notification is "friend request from A", we also publish a light version of A's information, to display along the notification.
All my friends (from Friends) and the related users information (from Meteor.users).
Information happening to me and my interactions with other users (from Activities and Meteor.users).
The list of my current conversations with people, friend or not (from Conversations) and their info (from Meteor.users).
The list of questions (from Questions).
Depends on the Session variable currentConversation. Get some of the messages (from Messages) for a given conversation.
Depends on the Session variable currentUserProfile (set when visiting a user profile). Publish user information from Meteor.users. What is published can be configured in Meteor.users.privateProfileInformation and Meteor.users.myProfileInformation (config file).
Publish pictures (from Photos) for the user set in currentUserProfile.
Publish activities for a given user (from currentUserProfile).
Publish a list of users (from Meteor.users) matching the search query in Session variable searchQuery. On-ready, set the searchQueryDone Session variable, to trigger client side update of the template.
Publish related Presences objects to know the online status of users in the search results.
Search is done according to the client criteria and the client current location. Result only includes user near the client location.
The default Meteor.users collection, with not much change. The profile information are stored in the profile field of a user document. Additional used fields are:
loc: stores the Mongo 2d geographical coordinates of a user, if availablevisible: indicates that the user can be seen/browsed by other users.profile_complete: indicates that the user finished the registration process and provide enough information to be left roaming freely on the website.cooldown: potential cooldown penalty for user posting messages too fast (for spam prevention).
Register the things happening to the users. Some are public (this can be tuned in the config file), some are for logging purpose only. The public activities are used to generate a user newsfeed.
Activities are meant to be updates on the server side through different user action on the site.
Meant to attach comment to different objects (Photos, ...). Implemented by not plugged to anything at the moment.
Register who's talking to who, useful to list all the conversation for a given user (the mailbox). Denormalize the last message of the conversation, the last time something happened and if the current conversation has been read or not.
A conversation belong to one user and indicates the other participant. Hence, a conversation with A and B has two documents, one for A to B, and one for B to A. This allow for easy retrieving of one user's live conversations.
Register messages users send to each other. Each message is associated to both A to B and B to A conversation.
Register the asymetric relation between users. If A and B are friends, we record a relation from A to B and B to A. If A or B breaks the relationship, both relation are destroyed. If A sends a friend request to B, only the A to B relation is created. If B confirms, the relation B to A is added, and both relations are marked as "reciprocal". Only reciprocal relations are published. Also denormalize the online status of users to their friends. When A is connected, it broadcast its online status to all its friend in the associated Friends document.
Stuff that are to be shown in the navbar. Notifications include things like friend request, friend request confirmation. And that's basically it for now.
Pictures user can upload. The Photos collection is based on filepicker. A previous version (Pictures) used CollectionFS to store the picture locally. Store the url of a picture and the owner.
Record user presence, last time they were seen, if they are online and the time they spent on the site.
Stores the questions to be retrieve to create the form for the users. Questions define their template (how to render them), their type, their name (to associate the question and the field in a user profile) their validation (typically, what kind of options are available in a dropdown) and can easily be extended (check servers/helpers/forms.js).
Questions can be presented to a user using the general helper make_question(name), name being the unique name of a question. When user submit a form containing a question, the validation associated with it is used.
Updates the current user profile. It can only apply to the profile of the user calling it. values contains an Object where the keys are a Question id. This guarantee that a user can only add/update information of his profile from a predefined Question in the database. This method also validate the value according to the validation embedded with the Question.
A few values have special processing:
- the
locationfield is used to create a mongo 2d index value (for proximity-based search) - the
dob(date of birth) field is copied in thedobtimefield as a Unix timestamp for easier manipulation later on.
Set profile.picture to point to the url of the Photos document whose _id is picture. Basically tell that this picture is the user's current profile picture.
Check that a user profile is complete. This can be tuned in the main.config.js file, variable Meteor.profileCreation.requiredFieldForCompletion. Check that all the fields are defined. If yes, sets the profile_complete and visible field of the current user to 1. The user is now visible to other user and can be searched for by other users.
Unused.
Allow for client side validation of form input, using the Questions validation.
Attempt to connect the current user with user who's _id is target. If A and B have no relation, a friend request is sent to B, if B already asked for A's friendship, the relationship is confirmed and symetrical.
Also check if the requesting user is not in the target user's blacklist. Update Notifications and Activities.
Remove a friendship between two users, both ways (A to B AND B to A). Just make the relationship not live and not reciprocal anymore.
Send the message document.body to user whose _id is document.to. A couple thing happens there. We first check that the sender is allowed to communicate with the target, and also compute a velocity score, to prevent people from sending message too fast (aiming at preventing automatic spamming).
The velocity/cooldown algorithm is quite trivial. Users are allowed to send X message per period of Y seconds (can be tuned in the main.config.js file). If they send faster than that, they get a penalty of Z seconds (again, can be configured). If they try again, they add Z second to the current penalty. An automatic spammer not throttling down its sending rate will then automatically blocked itself for hours or days.
Take the filePicker object and insert an entry in the database.
Record that the current user is connected to the website. If the user is visible (see setInvisible), broadcast the fact that he's online to his connections.
If invisible, stop broadcasting the user online status to his connections, otherwise keep broadcasting.
No idea. Does Meteor scale? If I/you run into a scaling issue, then success is at the door. Then I/you can invest time and money to ensure it scales.
Probably not, but feel free to fork it.
This project is licensed with the MIT license.