People who talk with others on IRC, particularly on #Drupal, will be happy to know that our loving IRC bot, Druplicon, is getting some love. Druplicon, if you don't know, is the IRC bot that idles in many of the Drupal IRC channels. It logs chats, helps you remember facts, and just is there when you feel like giving out the odd botsnack. Its powered by the Bot module, making it integrate with Drupal very nicely.

Anyway, I've been routing through the Bot module API lately and thought it could do much more then what it was currently being used for. Since it's run off of a Drupal website, we could integrate it with one of the many other modules out there. Just think, what could you do with an IRC bot on a Drupal website?

• Dynamically create "meeting note" nodes when you're having a meeting.
• Only accept people with Drupal user accounts into a given channel
• Asterisk to make phone calls from an IRC command prompt.
• Location module to spit out information about places it notices in a channel
• Private Message module to send private messages through the website from IRC
• Twitter to make tweet posts from your chat window.
• Weather to tell you what it's like outside
• Pirate module to have instant translations to Pirate-talk.... Yar.

In order to make any of these secure though, it definitely needed an authentication system. You wouldn't want people to make Twitter posts in your name, or take over your helpless IRC bot. So, I put together a small little module called that checks your IRC hostname,and your Drupal username. It worked pretty well, so I thought I'd take it one step further and allow me to make Twitter posts from IRC. Here's the result:

< RobLoach > TwitterBot: twitter Testing the new Twitter Bot Drupal module for IRC Twitter posting!< TwitterBot > RobLoach: You successfully posted to Twitter.< NotRobLoach > TwitterBot: twitter I'm posing as Rob Loach!< TwitterBot > NotRobLoach: You are not authenticated to post on Twitter.

If you don't believe me, check the log! Anyway, posting to Twitter is just the beginning. If you want it, the code is available, and I'll be working with eaton, Morbus, dmitrig01 and cwgordon7 to make Bot module the best it can be. This is the start of some awesome things happening to Druplicon. Having authenticated sessions means we can do some really powerful stuff. I'm particularly looking forward to private messages that send when the recipient returns from being offline. What's on your wish list for Druplicon?