Google announced that Google Friend Connect features are now available for the Drupal and Joomla content management systems. This means that content publishers using these platforms can integrate Google’s product, which basically turns your site into a mini social network.
"Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features — all without writing a single line of code," says Globant’s Mauro Gonzalez on Google’s Social Web Blog. "Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins."
The Google Friend Connect integrations with Drupal and Joomla include features like:
– Interest Polls
– AdSense
– Newsletter Subscriptions
– Featured Content
– Gadgets (like Members, Comments, Recommendations, Activities, Reviews and the Social Bar)
"When a user joins a Friend Connect site, an account is created and automatically associated with his or her external account of choice (Google, Yahoo, or Twitter, for example)," explains Gonzalez. "The social gadgets can be placed anywhere in the site using the standard Drupal and Joomla administration interfaces. Site owners can moderate reviews and comments, create new polls to collect information about community members, and then advertise on the site using that information. The newsletter feature allows site owners to create and manage their newsletters using Friend Connect’s interface, and site members can subscribe and unsubscribe as desired using the newsletter gadget."
There are demos of both the Drupal and Joomla Google Friend Connect integrations set up here and here respectively. Some are hoping Google will continue to provide integrations for other content management systems, and it is probably not too much of a stretch to assume they will do so in the future.
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