How can one use Django Postman to set up a back end messaging system like Facebook?

Question

I've done research on Django Postman and it seems to be the most solid private user to user messaging platform out there. I've looked at the Django Postman documentation but it's very template orientated. For developers who use Django as a back end and only care about the views.py and urls.py, the documentation doesn't say much.

I did however find this: https://bitbucket.org/psam/django-postman/src/6ff9fdf9c33f7365a7235a789af2e47f47d9c4fa/postman/views.py?at=default

It seems pretty promising so I'm going to give it a try. My only issue is how can one set up the postman views in views.py and the urls in urls.py to create a messaging system similar to Facebook's?

(ie. A thread like messaging conversation system, a central inbox where all the messages come together from each user showing the last message from each user, messages in the inbox are sorted by conversation rather than the message, the time of the last message sent, allowing multiple recipients)

Below I've posted a picture of Facebook's messaging platform. This is what I am essentially trying to achieve with Django Postman.

Facebook Example http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/73000/73077/facebook-19-371x535.jpg

If you have any pointers, hints and ideas on how I can set up the views.py, I would greatly appreciate it! Thank You

Answer 1

I've run into this issue before.

You need to strictly override some of the views in there by clonning/forking the project and install it from your own location, because as you noted, postman is template-oriented because it's meant to only get the needed templates configured and a few settings. I mean, the backend is meant to work as is.

What you need to do is override stuff like:

• Message model's recipient field to be a ManyToManyField
• customize the views based on your needs and be careful with Message.replied_at
• make sure you allow a user to reply to their own messages (by default, it was not allowed when I ran into this, not sure now)

Depending on your needs, maybe you'll want to override something else, but this is a good start. If you need it facebook-like, you'll need to use some push libraries as Pusher or Juggernaut, maybe you're interested in them also.

Good luck! :)