By chrishaslam on

The aim of Footy 24/7 was to provide a central site for UK football information with no bias to larger sites hence a range of sites are listed, from official Premiership sites to one-man blogs. Currently the best sites that do this like Newsnow order their top stories by clicks rather than an actual 'thumbs up' so Digg-style voting is also implemented.

Aggregation
This is done using the excellent feedparser module which I've been beta testing for a while. Unfortunately a lot of sites being aggregated that aren't common like Drupal or Wordpress have caused issues mostly around them not using nice date formats and various encoding issues. Thanks to budda for timely CVS updates to my range of awkward queries.

Voting
Voting is done via the Vote up/down module which gives simple +1 Digg-style voting on aggregated nodes. I'm using the out of the box module with changes only being made to the theme. To get the listings by date/rating/video/image the views module is used with a mixture of arguments and filters to achieve the various layouts, for example:
Liverpool FC stories ordered by date
Liverpool FC stories ordered by vote

Videos & Images
Videos and images are aggregated from Youtube and flickR respectively again using feedparser which supports enclosures. Videos can be watched onsite without leaving using this handy Javascript, a good example can be seen here by simply clicking the 'watch video' link at the bottom of the node. This could be really useful especially as in the last few days Chelsea partnered with Youtube and other UK clubs could soon follow.

Feeds
Using the built in feed functionality in Drupal I was able to create one big feed for all teams then specific ones for each team allowing users to cleanly use one feed for their favourite team in their reader which can be seen here

Thanks to everyone at Drupal for making this possible as it simply wouldn't have been with my extremely limited programming experience.

Any comments or suggestions most appreciated.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

Nice to see Feedparser module out in the wild on sites with a lot of content!

You're listed as a featured site on the Feedparser project page ;-)

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

chrishaslam’s picture

chrishaslam commented

Thanks for the feedback, any others (whether good or bad) appreciated ;)

I got a PM asking how I was displaying team logos next to each category, this was done using the taxonomy image module

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http://www.Footy247.co.uk

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Managed Drupal hosting from Ixis IT

candlewax’s picture

candlewax commented

I am looking to use feedparser to make something similar to list relevant media from youtube.

Do you get the videos from youtube via RSS feeds? Also how do you make the read more link say watch video and load the media into the popup?

many thanks

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

The bundled Feed Enclosure module has a function which can be themed. The function lets you change what the enclosure link url looks like, if at all.

I guess the site checks the MIME type of the enclosure, and changed the link text as needed.

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

taqwa’s picture

taqwa commented

This is exactly what I want to do with my site. Could you help a guy using 5.x out? I can't seem to figure out how to process feeds into nodes.

abqaria’s picture

abqaria commented

I installed feedparser

tried to aggregate from youtube and got this error

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /home/iblogger/public_html/sites/all/modules/feedparser/feedmanager.module on line 727

droople’s picture

droople commented

I see these menus

Stories ordered by: Date/popularity|video|picture

They are displayed according to a taxonomy term, eg Arsenal , Charlton will have a different menu linking to a particular view

So how did u get to have the menu display accoding to a certain taxonomy or node type?

Thank you

chadchandler’s picture

chadchandler commented

Very cool Site. If I was into UK Football I would sign up for sure :)

Could share some of your "Views" Settings. My project is very similar to this. Either way you decide, nice work!

The best way to predict your future, is to create it!

chrishaslam’s picture

chrishaslam commented

CChandler2424, Thanks for the feedback. In regards to the views I'm using arguments, for example

http://www.footy247.co.uk/latest/Arsenal
View settings
Provide page view: yes
URL: latest/$arg
view type: teaser list
Arguement type: taxonomy term name (option 0 for full term)
Node type: is one of aggregator item
Node published: equals yes
Node author name: is one of newsbot
Node created time: descending

So I have a vocabulary called Premiership and terms within that (Arsenal, Chelsea etc) and these are passed to the URL as an argument to create a view for each team

Droople, the menus are basically blocks put into regions with body source like:

<a href="/latest/<?php echo arg(1); ?>">News</a> 
<a href="/video/<?php echo arg(1); ?>">Videos</a>

So if you are on page http://www.footy247.co.uk/latest/Arsenal the menu will pass the argument over to other views thereby creating 'related' views like:

/latest/Arsenal
/video/Arsenal

HTH

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Managed Drupal hosting from Ixis IT

abqaria’s picture

abqaria commented

i need to make a link

watch the video how do u d it ?

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

The link is handled by the enclosure module, which has a themeable function you can replace in your theme - meaning you can output the needed code to make the link use some JavaScript and pop up a nicer lightbox player window.

--
Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

philip.spence’s picture

philip.spence commented

Is this the enclosure module you used? http://drupal.org/node/156067 I've tried using this to no avail. It isn't picking up the youTube link from my rss feed. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

Never seen or heard of that module before!

he enclosure module is packaged with Feedparser (4.7)

--
Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

philip.spence’s picture

philip.spence commented

Ahh, yeah I figured out that was the wrong thing, however I can't get the enclosure bit of the feedparser to work, it's storing the information (url to file) in the database fine, but it's not displaying it in the node. How do I go about doing this? Any help or pointers in the direction to some documentation would my greatly appreciated.

jubei’s picture

jubei commented

Great Site! I'm sure it will be a big success. Thanks for sharing this info. I'm testing on my local machine and have got the javascript lightbox player so that it pops up when the link is clicked but the youtube video doesnt play. When I right click on the video area, the player is recognizing that there is flash embedded, but says (in the flash menu) "movie not loaded" and the "link" goes to the correct youtube video. Just wondering if you came across any similar issue or if there is something simple I may be forgetting?

Amix’s picture

Amix commented

great site! i really like the theme too!! well done,was the theme custom made or is it a free template?

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

I know nothing about the sport, but your site is GREAT! :D

chrishaslam’s picture

chrishaslam commented

It was a custom drupal theme via Ixis

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http://www.Footy247.co.uk

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Managed Drupal hosting from Ixis IT