Totara Social Open Discussions

Pushing external Social Media posts into Social

I've had a question raised by prospective end user of Totara Social.

We know we can share messages outbound from Social into other Social Media spaces, e.g. Facebook, but what about pushing messages inbound into Totara Social from those external sites?

There is the External 'Feed' in the pages - so imagine you could set up a view to a feed of posts, but the question is more around targeted postings into Totara Social, e.g. into Pages or into specific forums.

Is there any discussions about this or perhaps might become a feature request (can move this to Feature Request if necessary)

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Hi Sue. We are integrating feeds at a Group level, not artefact level. They will show in the group's activity stream and each member of said group should also see them appear in their own personal activity stream. So, if we were to begin integrating Twitter feeds (based on people or keywords or hashtags), we'd expect it to behave the same way, unless there was a persuasive argument to display in a separate block (which could then be imported into a Page')

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Not sure if related, but we had this feature request at some point https://tracker.totaralms.com/browse/TS-830 which we decided not to proceed with due to security and performance issues.

I think there was a similar request from Kineo as well and I tried to explain that it is not something that we can do for a simple reason: Twitter or Facebook are one big service with a known URL and API. Totara Social is not a global installation, everyone hosts their own instance and version of the system. By pushing content into Social how would you know which system you are pushing it into?

We also had a feature in one of the recent releases where we provide a code snippet (like widget) that people can include on their pages. This simplifies creating posts in Social by just clicking a button and opening a small window with a status update text area. This feature requires people to be in control of their 3rd party system because they need to add code to their web page. An example would be adding a "Share on Social" button on a course page for people to post when they complete the course. Or something along these lines.

Yuliya

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Yuliya do you have more information on this Share on Social button you mentioned ? I don't see anything in the documentation.

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Hi Charles,

I could not find anything in the user docs either. I will follow up with the Documentation team.

If you have access to the administration, you can navigate to "Extensions > Plugin Administration" and then click on "Configuration" next to "statusupdate" under "Plugin type: artefact" section, this will open the form where you can enable "code embedding". The code snippet provided can be changed however you need it to. It should give you an idea of how status update posting can be embedded on other sites.