What is Steem Social?
The main purpose of the app is to help promote SteemIt posts to various social media channels such as Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. And at the same time it will provide a simple analytics of the shared posts depending on the data availability of the APIs from these channels. We will also create metrics to rank posts according to the number of likes, comments, and shares gathered.
The idea was inspired by existing applications that allow users to post to different social media channels from one application. But for this project, we will only be managing the posts that we can pull from the SteemIt API and share them to different channels. This app will serve as a medium to easily share SteemIt posts and at the same time create shared posts that are visually appealing.
Technology Stack
- SteemJS
- Yii PHP Framework
- HTML/CSS - Bootstrap Framework
- jQuery / JS
- APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
Currently the project was built using old school technologies mainly because I will be reusing ready made API's that I have worked on my previous projects. Part of my roadmap is to rewrite everything to NodeJS or probably Django, still weighing things.
If you have comments and ideas that will surely help improve the project please don't hesitate to leave a comment or contact me.
Roadmap
This project is a bit broad and might be a little too ambitious, but here are the following features that I'd like to see in the future. This is taking into consideration that the main goal of this project is to become a social media hub to promote SteemIt and the contents that we have on this platform. The items below are still rough roadmap items, will discuss each of them further once I started working on them.
- Blog Feeds (Work In Progress)
- Sharing Capability to other Social Media Channels
- Browser Plugins (extend sharing capabilities to SteemIt website)
- Mobile Compatibility (initial goal is to support Mobile Web, site is already viewable but need further UI enhancements)
- Separate Android and iOS Application
- Site Analytics
The items below are not the major concern as of the moment as most of these may require a little funding. But this is greatly needed moving forward. The Utopian rewards and the support on my posts will be used to fund the project.
- Revamp the Design
- Setup a much more suitable hosting and environment for this project
Currently, we are temporarily staged at https://nihongonewbie.com/user/feed/shoganaii
The site is pretty much a work in progress, but since it's a big one will try to work on this in phases. The first phase includes the initial framework of the project built using Yii and Bootstrap. The initial features includes a capability to pull data from SteemIt via SteemJS, specifically the user information and the blog posts. I have also added a Facebook sharing capability. A lot of work still needs to be done, but as mentioned will go along with it in phases.
The goals for the next phase would be:
- Optimize the layout of the SteemIt Feeds and Posts
- Add Support for Twitter and Google
- Revamp UI and other Frontend Enhancements
How to Use
The project is currently hosted at https://nihongonewbie.com/user/feed/shoganaii.
You can change "shoganaii" to any SteemIt user that you want to check the feeds. On each feed, you have a Facebook Button.
When the button is clicked you will be asked to Login via Facebook and accept the needed permissions. Once done, the post will be shared on your user timeline. Facebook login is no longer neede if you are already login, and the permissions will only be asked once. The next time you share a post, it will automaticall be posted on your wall. Just need to add some notifications after the share was made.
I will create a much more detailed user guide in a bit. Stay tuned.
How to Contribute?
So far, I was the only one working on this project. But once I already have stable version and release, I will be asking some contributions from other developers as well as there are technologies that I am still not familiar with. This is also a great way to speed up the development process and hopefully the work that we will be doing will benefit the entire SteemIt Community.
As of this stage, most of the work needed are design related. I will be creating tasks requests later on to help me with the project, so I am very much looking forward for everyone's support. There will be bounties but I won't promise much.
If you would like to contribute to the project or have suggestions or ideas that will greatly help SteemSocial, you can contact me at severinolorillajr@gmail.com or at Discord (shoganaii).
Related Links
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors