Last night we gathered at the Bryght office for our monthly Vancouver League of Drupaleers user group meeting. Theoretically I help run the group, but Dale McGladdery does most of the heavy lifting.

This month Dale got the guys from the Donat Group to come over and talk about the set of Facebook API modules that they are building to make it easier to build Facebook apps with Drupal.

All I can say is....wow. James and Ross took us through how they built their Opus Player Facebook app, and we had lots of discussion / beta feedback. They've built something very interesting, and I can't wait to see it hit Facebook.

After mainly looking at the app itself (related but not yet integrated into Project Opus, although those are the future plans -- to mirror the functionality in Facebook on the public Project Opus site as well), we dove right into some code. Not yet available in Drupal CVS (soon!), there is some code posted here.

So what does this mean? Well, the Donat Group team built a great Facebook app, and just happened to implement it using Drupal. Along the way (and, um, at least one rewrite / refactor :P) they built a great set of base tools for interacting with Facebook APIs and generating FBML content. The Drupal framework gets another win for being a great flexible base to build all sorts of functionality on top of.

OK, so that's all well and good if you're a developer: your time to Facebook-enable your Drupal site will be cut down drastically, and you can focus on building a useful app (the hard part).

What does this mean to end users? To communities? Well, as this code progresses and matures, the goal might well be to commoditize Facebook apps: install a Drupal module, plug in the appropriate API keys and flip some switches, and easily create a Facebook app that pushes content from your open website into Facebook...and vice versa. Exciting. We have lots to learn in the other direction as well: I think the notion of the "mini-feed" is something that every social media website should implement.

Thanks again to the Donat guys -- great presentation, and some great work you've done.

Want to follow along with Facebook API for Drupal? Join the Facebook API group on groups.drupal.org. Want to talk Drupal within Facebook? Join either the main Drupal group or our local Vancouver Drupal User's group. Lastly, in more general Facebook related items, Vancouver will be having a Facebook Developer Garage organized by Gerald Bauer some time in mid-October.