drupal

After four months of relatively slow development of Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP), I am happy to tag the branch with 6.x-1.1 release. It might be the last release for this branch, as I would now be upgrading FBSMP to support the latest 6.x-3.x branch of Facebook-style Statuses. A lot of cool features are coming up with this release especially in the beloved link plugin, link plugin: allow users to share links to audio sharing sites such as soundcloud, 8tracks....

Do you feel passionate about any open source technology? Or you want to explore one during your summer vacations? On the top of it, if you get a mentor to guide you all along and a stipend of 5000 USD, would you be interested? Yeah! Keep reading then. [caption id=“attachment_741” align=“alignright” width=“198” caption=“GSoC 2011”] [/caption] Google announced its consecutive 7th year for Summer of Code program on January 24, 2011. Google Summer of Code program encourages students from all over the world to engage in open source project development of their choice for 3 months. Look out for the details of the program here: http://socghop.appspot.com/ and the timeline: http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline

After months of hard work and support from Isaac and Thomas, I am proud to announce the first stable release of Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP). FBSMP allows user to share content such as links, videos, photos and documents along with their Facebook-style Statuses. It allows you to create a social networking site similar to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and others out-of-the-box. On the top, it integrates with a lot of other Drupal modules (as Activity, Trigger, Rules, Heartbeat, ImageCache, EmVideo, UserPoints, and more) which lets you do a lot more things with your website....

I worked on the module Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP) for Drupal, this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code program mentored by Isaac Sukin. This module lets users publish content (links, images, videos and documents) in a stream, along with their Facebook-style Statuses (like on Facebook, or Twitter). When I say that I worked on it as part of GSoC, it would be only partly true. I started working on it around March 2010, when I was contacted by Thomas to create a Drupal module for his site which would imitate the link share feature from Facebook, Google Buzz. I wrote the small module Facebook-style Links, which worked quite well but it was then this occurred to me, “why not create a module which can publish any content, which is extensible to publish any kind of content like images, links, videos, documents, audio, etc”. Today, I am happy to say that Drupal now has a complete Micropublisher which can be used to create any kind of microblogging platform such as Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. I will be posting the first release of the module soon, but before here is the small list of features and a few screenshots.

Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) was released on 3rd March, and currently supports the following features: Automatically downloads and attaches image to the node created by Feeds module. Configurable XPath of the desired image location on the webpage of the feed item on per feed basis (using element’s id or CSS class). Support for FileField Paths module. Configurable maximum image size. Configurable minimum and maximum image resolutions. In this post, I will briefly demonstrate how to configure the settings for FIG to efficiently grab images for feed items.

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. [caption id=“attachment_484” align=“aligncenter” width=“607” caption=“Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca”] [/caption]

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.

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: [cc lang=“php”] [/cc] or multiple CSS classes associated with it. [cc lang=“php”] [/cc] Now if you want to select the HTML elements with class “foo”, this div element would be one of them.

Updates: Feeds Image Grabber has been released to support the new Feeds module. (3 march 2010) Tutorial for Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) published. (6 march 2010) Demonstration Website is available here. (6 march 2010) 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 [caption id=“attachment_258” align=“aligncenter” width=“570” caption=“a feed item from google reader”] [/caption] 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!!