Add-on Demand for a Friends and Contacts addon.

[Alpha1]

Friends, contacts and related privacy settings functionality is vital to many sites. While some sites suffice with followers there is a large demand for friends functionality. Especially from sites migrating from IPB and vb.
@Crazy-Achmet originally funded the Waindigo friends addon and I funded the vbulletin importer for it. The addon was popular but proved to have too many problems/bugs. No one has since created a replacement.

The concept is similar to Facebook:

1. Members can send a friendship request.
   
2. If the other party confirms, then the members are listed as friends on their profiles.
3. Friends can be subscribed to. (followed & watched)
   
4. Privacy controls allow members to share content with friends only. Addons can extent this.

The popularity of such functionality is clearly visible and as long as the code quality is there it would be easy for a developer to take advantage of the opportunity.

I know there are people who have the opinion that stock XF followers functionality suffices. But please respect that this is not the case for everyone. So please do not make this thread a discussion about whether or not people should use such an addon.

 

[HWS]

Audentio has announced that the Friends add-on "will be the first ThemHouse add-on getting significant updates". So it may just be a matter of days until it will be useable. I doubt another developer will create a new one from scratch in the meantime.

 

[Alpha1]

That addon seems beyond repair and will need a rewrite instead of trying to patch up the mess. The original author himself deemed that he could not salvage it after implementing ~35 bug fix releases. I commend TH if they are going to try it. But friends functionality is too important to have problematic code. Other addons need to be able to rely on the code. For that it needs to be coded robust from the ground up.

Friends functionality is not very advanced functionality. So a rewrite by a qualified developer seems the best approach.

 

[truonglv]

Sound interesting. What is content you want to share to your friends?