This past monday I met a couple of Drupal developers and people who are actually interested in learning Drupal. The group was a nice mix of people sharing experiences and others trying to keep up and learn the most they can. It felt great, seeing what people expect from Drupal and what people have done with it, or what do they use Drupal for, but they all had one thing in common, it's always hard to find good modules or the one that you really need.
In Drupal you can take the same task in many different ways, the problem is when you get to the point where you realize that you should have chosen the other one. And here's an example.
So, this is my approach on reviewing some Drupal modules to let users know what kind of things you can do with them.
Let's start:
FeedAPI
This module let you create feed nodes that will be used to read feeds and process them. The usual task is create different nodes from the Feed one.
It works this way: You create a Feed node and that node will be responsible for reading the feed and process it. You can do a lot with that feed (that's why its an API), but you will mostly use it to create nodes from the information it retrieves. The feed can be RSS/Atom but you can use extra modules to parse different kind of feeds like iCal, CSV, KML, etc.
Also, with Feed Element Mapper you can map elements of the feed to CCK fields, taxonomies and locations.
When to use it?
The aggregator module from Drupal can also read and display feeds but doesn't offer the same flexibility than FeedAPI. If you need to do things with the data you are pulling, like using it for Views or CCK, or if you want to keep your database clean because FeedAPI can take care of removing older entries, then FeedAPI is your perfect choice.
In other words, FeedAPI is "the way" to add content to your Drupal site from RSS/Atom/iCal/etc.
Better Formats
This modules takes care of cleaning the site from some Drupal annoyances.
You can remove the infamous "Formatting tips", set a default text filter by role and hiding the rest, keep the formatting fieldset collapsed, etc. You set everything with permissions and the module is really lightweight and compatible. In general is a "must have" if you manage a blog or any site that wants to look clean.
Views Node Feed
This is one of the examples where the module name doesn't help you know what it could be used for. It's not yet in stable version but it works pretty well.
The idea with this module is being able to render Views as anything you want, RSS, XML, JSON, anything. It works very easily, when you create your Views you just need to set the style as Views Node Feed, then select the template.
The template creation is _very_ simple, first you have the wrapper:
<?php print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>"; ?>
<nodes>
***VIEWS_NODE_FEED_ITEMS***
</nodes>
<?php drupal_set_header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8'); ?>
Then you add whatever you need. You can play with Devel here.
<node> <nid><?php print $node->nid ?></nid> <title><?php print $node->title ?></title> <preview><?php print $node->field_image[0]['filepath'] ?></preview > <votevalue><?php print $node->votevalue ?></votevalue> </node>
That simple! And if you need arguments or anything like that, don't forget that you are using Views.
That's for now, three modules that maybe you haven't used before, but remember that this is not a tutorial, just a short review of what to expect from these modules.
Post new comment