Facebook-style Links (FBSL) provides the ability for users to attach and submit links along with their Facebook-style Statuses. Combined with Facebook-style Statuses (FBSS), the FBSL module provides an attach link form that loads via AHAH. Users can then attach a link with an (optional) thumbnail, title and description to their status. In the nutshell, it imitates the link attachment feature on Facebook.
Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca
Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) is the successor project for FeedAPI ImageGrabber to support the Feeds module. FIG parses the Item URL of each feed-item, downloads the appropriate image from the post and maps it to an image field in the node created by Feeds module for that feed-item.
[Google Reader (with thumbnails) can be imitated on a Drupal site by using Feeds, Feeds Image Grabber, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, ImageAPI and Views module].
I often come across this question from my friends and peers and most of the time I deflect it by saying “it lets you create your website easily, why don’t you look up on Wikipedia?”. Few days ago, one of my friends pointed me that most of the articles start with “Drupal is a Content Management System(CMS) …” which becomes pretty much confusing when one has no idea about what a CMS is. In this post, I have tried to explain what a CMS is and why we need it and how Drupal stands out among various other available CMSs.
Let us say you need to create a webpage for your website. Ideally, it would mean you create HTML content that will be delivered to someone who requests it through their web browser. Eventually you grow big and decide to add 100 more pages to your website and therefore create 100 more HTML pages. But then you realize that there is a lot of duplicate content. The footer which contains the copyright information is essentially the same on all pages, therefore if you ever need to edit it then it would mean to edit these 101 pages. This will be a lot of redundant work.
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Recently, while working on my project FeedAPI ImageGrabber I came across the issue where I had to select HTML elements by a given css class. The HTML element can have a single CSS class:
or multiple CSS classes associated with it.
Now if you want to select the HTML elements with class “foo”, this div element would be one of them.
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I get a lot of requests for this, so here is a tutorial explaining the 3 W’s (What, Why and How) of FeedAPI ImageGrabber.
Motivation
a feed item from google reader
This is a screenshot of a news item from my Google Reader. Anyone who has a moderate knowledge about the feeds would know that the image on the left in the above news-item is actually not published with the feed.
In other words, If you refresh any feed on your Drupal website using FeedAPI, you won’t get the image in the posts, unless they are published along with the feed which is quite rare.
The purpose of FeedAPI Imagegrabber is to make the feed more informative as well as interesting for the user. As, we all know that “comics are much better than novels”, this module appends the feed-item with an appropriate image from its content URL. The goal of the FeedAPI ImageGrabber is to mimic the thumbnail display of Google Reader for the feeds on your Drupal website.
As soon as you refresh the feed, ImageGrabber automatically attaches an appropriate image from the original article to the feed-item node on your website. You don’t even have to press an extra button!!
Introduction
FeedAPI Imagegrabber is a add-on module for FeedAPI. It consists of a parser which visits the original URL of a new feed item, and retrieves the main image from the post. Once the main image has been retrieved, it is then converted into a thumbnail using the ImageCache module, and stored in the node created by FeedAPI, inside a CCK field.
The purpose of FeedAPI Imagegrabber is to make the feed more informative as well as interesting for the user. As, we all know that “comics are much better than novels”, this module appends the feed-item with an appropriate image from its content URL. The goal of the module is to mimic the thumbnail display of websites such as digg.com. This goal is acheived by using FeedAPI to turn RSS feed-items into nodes, and then using FeedAPI Imagegrabber to append these nodes with an appropriate image from the feed-item’s webpage.
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