Social Extension Progress and Timeline Up

For the social extension project that my group and I are working on, I have the initial setup for the extension for the project and a Gwibber test window. Bertrand Lorentz, one of the Banshee maintainers, setup the skeleton of the social extension and posted it for us on the repo. However, the extension is not on the main repo. Bertrand said that there is a community extensions repo where all of the in progress extensions are kept. Once my team and I complete the extension, Bertrand will review it and then post it to the main repo for us. He also mentioned that with the approach of version 2.0 in April, that our extension probably won't be included until the following release.So, it may be a while before our extension becomes apart of Banshee. Once it does go into the next version after 2.0, it will feel very fulfilling to contribute something more than a bug fix.

Right now, I have the social extension skeleton running on Banshee. It was a little tricky to get it built at first because it was missing references from the actual Banshee project. To resolve this problem, I had to setup my references in MonoDevelop to reference the projects that were being imported in the social extension class. I have not put any code into the extension yet, because my team and I have not begun that stage yet, but we will get there eventually. 

The big hurdle that I accomplished so far in the project was getting the Gwibber test window to communicate successfully with certain social networks. I was having a problem for the longest time trying to get the Gwibber window to allow me to post to Facebook or Twitter. Every time I ran the window code, I would get a dialog box that allowed me to insert a status, but when I hit send, it only allowed me to submit the message locally on my machine. Today, when I was doing some more work with the Gwibber test window, it dawned on me that maybe I had to be logged into the Gwibber social client on my Linux machine in order for the Gwibber test window to work properly. Once I started the Gwibber software, added my Facebook and Twitter accounts and then ran the Gwibber test window, I was able to select which social network I wanted to post my message. After sending a test message, it successfully posted to my Facebook account. This was a big weight off my shoulders and it will be for the rest of the team, because we have been trying to figure this issue out for a while. With this problem out of the way, the only challenges that await us now are figuring out how to embed the extension into the software so that a currently playing song is able to be shared.