Any plans to expose discussions via the NING APIs?

[John F Moore]

I would like to automate the generation of discussion items based upon activities taking place elsewhere on the web (RSS feeds primarily).  Are there any plans to expose discussions via the API?

[Eric Suesz]

No current plans. We don't have any major work going on with the API right now, but I can understand how this could be an interesting implementation. 

[John F Moore]

Thanks Eric.  I wrote a very light-weight  RSS-> Blog Article Importer and would love to do the same for Twitter Search -> Discussion Importer.  Let me know, if possible, if there is ever a better for this type of functionality as this would be a quick win for my network, clearly work on Ning's end.

[TJ @ jQueryHelp]

Hi John,

I noticed in your reply that you wrote an importer for Blogs.  I assume you used the Ning API ( http://developer.ning.com/docs/ningapi/1.0/reference/blogs.html ) and were hoping to do the same with Discussions.  But as you know, that can't be done via the Ning API.

But I'm fairly sure it can be done with jQuery.  If you are the NC of your site, you could create a "page" with a trigger button that would run jQuery code to grab twitter search results and automatically add them, one by one, as discussions.  You can get the twitter search results in json format (one example: http://www.lupomontero.com/fetching-tweets-with-jquery-and-the-twit... ) and then open another browser tab with code, adding the tweet to the querystring, and have js in your custom code box read that and insert the data in the right fields of the Discussion Add page and then trigger the "Add Discussion" button.  Might sound confusing but I did something similar with modifying thousands of blog posts with jQuery for a client.  It was kind of cool to sit at my computer and watch things happening on the screen automatically by code.

I don't know your level of knowledge with jQuery but just wanted to let you know that there is probably a way to do this, if it's really something you have to have on your site.

Best wishes!

"TJ"

[John F Moore]

Great idea TJ!  I may do that as the jQuery should be pretty straight-forward.

Brilliant!  Thank you.

[TJ @ jQueryHelp]

You're welcome, John.  Glad to be of help!