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Drupal Ping.FM Module

Tue, 07/14/2009 - 3:44am

This blog post will show you how to properly setup the Ping.FM module on Drupal 6. The documentation is pretty poor and setup took me a bit of searching. The runaround was worth it thought because I had the opportunity to learn a little bit about how the Ping.FM API works.

The Ping.FM module for Drupal provides you the ability to automatically post your content submission updates to your Ping.FM account. What does this Ping thing do? It let's you very easily and quickly post updates to:

  • Facebook status
  • LinkedIn status
  • MySpace status
  • Twitter
  • Many more social networking mediums

Once you submit new content in Drupal it is sent to Ping.FM and then Ping connects with your social networking sites to post it immediately. This is a great tool for saving time on social media marketing campaigns and can help drive traffic to your site. It also can post to your Drupal site via an update on Ping.FM.

In this blog post I will show you how to set up your Ping.FM module to submit your Drupal content to Ping.FM. The biggest misconception here is that each USER in the system can associate their own Ping.FM account with their username for posts. It is not posting all site content for every user on one Ping.FM account. This is more of a feature then a nuisance in my opinion.

Installing the module

  • Get the latest build at the Ping.FM project page
  • Extract and copy the files to your /sites/all/modules (or respectable) location
  • Visit /admin/build/modules to enable the module

Configuring the module

  • Visit /admin/settings/pingfm and check the boxes for the content types you wish to update Ping on
  • No need to change the developer key unless you want to apply for your own developer API key on Ping (http://ping.fm/developers)
  • Head to /user and click on the edit tab to edit your user account
  • Expand the block for Ping.FM and put in your Desktop / Web key from Ping (http://ping.fm/key)
  • Give users permission to post to Ping at /admin/user/permissions
  • When you post content expand the little Ping.fm block and tick the Announce this post on Ping.fm

All done! Enjoy your time-savings!