Updating Scripture Filter to load verse text into the page itself

Some of these features look great. I love it.

I'm going to be on vacation (my honeymoon) and basically out of the loop for the next 3 weeks. When I get back I'll give this a good review of functionality, UI, and a code review. This is great. Keep up the good work.

Thanks, Andy! I have scripturefilter incorporated into our church's website which is set to go live in less than a week. It's working just fine, and it fills a very real need. A couple observations:

• the module doesn't show up in the 'Access control' listing; as a result, only 'user one' can administer the Scripture Filter options, since you can't give rights to any other user (such as the administrator role we have).
• I added an crude hack on line 150 in scripturefilter.inc, adding 'target="_blank"' to the href so that links to Bible Gateway would open in a new window or tab rather than hijacking the drupal window. It would be nice to have a checkbox option to enable this behavior in the admin area. ( I'd be glad to try to implement this if you'd like--but only AFTER we have our site up and live!)
• My original thought--before I ran across your discussion with Matt on the Geeks & God site--was to try to implement a CCK field that accepted a scripture reference and filtered it very much like this module does. My thought was that it might be useful to have the reference available as a field, allowing it's use in Views, etc. with more options for placement and theming... What do you think?

Keep up the great work! Thanks again, --Gary

target="_blank" should not be used anymore. There are a lot of us who just don't like this. It's more of a let the user decide thing these days. Right click a link and choose new window or tab if that's what you want.

The compliant thing to do is use javascript to make this happen if you want to force it.

Thanks for the updates, Andy. I'll update our scripturefilter with the new code soon. The link you provided was helpful for understanding the issue, as well.

It turns out that the idea of a "scripture reference" CCK field is largely moot--you've already provided it! I just added regular text fields to my "Daily Reading" content type labeled "Reading" and "Key Verse", and then selected Filtered Input rather than plain text. Works great. Probably the additional functionality that would go into a dedicated scripture field-type would have to do with ensuring that the input was a valid Scripture reference (or try to tweak it into one). I couldn't justify the dev time, since scripturefilter meets the need quite well already.

Were you ever able to get ahold of Steve Simms about this?

Hi Andy,

Sorry for not ever getting back to you on this. With all of the revisions and added features, it's basically an entirely different module, so I'm not sure how I could go about reviewing it -- I should have mentioned that a lot sooner, rather than letting it stand and hoping I'd get the chance to look at it in depth. That clearly hasn't happened.

If you're still interested in working on this module vs. creating your own as you mentioned elsewhere, could you split this patch up into smaller chunks, with one issue per patch, and create separate issues here for each one? As I mentioned in #221485: Port to 6.0, I'd especially like patches that make the code simpler and easier to maintain, and will probably not approve changes that add a lot of complexity -- that might help in your decision whether to work with this module or create your own.

What do you think?

(I've also just updated all of the other open issues, so you can find some other thoughts there on possible improvements to the module.)

@Andy: What's the status here? Maybe it is time to breakout and create your own module. I like many of the things at http://drupal.org/node/202907 also that have not been added to this module. From the work I see here it looks like you would be a good guy to main a module. Also your sandbox is giving me a 500 error.

Having recently taken over maintaining this module, I'm looking at all the issues in the queue to take stock of the feature requests (and bug reports) that are outstanding.

It strikes me that this particular issue has become a little tangled, drawing in many separate changes and improvements into one growing patch. Patched, as it was, against 5.x, (two major core releases ago), that patch would need to be rerolled. However the usual Drupal way of having one feature or bug per issue is far cleaner and makes reviewing and committing code much easier.

The original proposal, however, was to take advantage of the ESV API, so that as the user hovers over the text, or clicks on / near the Bible reference, the actual verse(s) are displayed. I like that proposal, and it would be a good feature to implement in a later release of this module. The comment thread above also mentions that eBible.com have also developed an API, so it may be that something similar is possible for other translations too.

I'm therefore marking this issue as for version 7.x-1.x, and changing the status back to "active". It would be good to get a patch that would implement a feature like that.

I'm slightly lost as to which other new features were being suggested in the various comments above. If there were other new features in this issue thread that someone wants to see, please could they open a new issue for each one. That way, this issue can now be kept clean to refer only to using online Bible APIs to embed the verse-text itself in the node output.

Changing the title of this issue, to make it clearer what it's about. This is about taking a website that provides an API to retrieve the actual text of the verses in question and then embed that text in the page itself. The text would then be displayed in a popup, tooltip, or something like that.

This is distinct from, e.g., reftagger, which is one of a few javascript libraries that exist which will do this kind of lookup in the client. There is a place for that, but those javascript libraries do their own pattern matching to find Bible references. The benefit of this input filter is that it is not dependent on the web browser having javascript enabled, so this would be about looking up the verse text on the server.

Clearly a feature like this would need to be optional on any given site. It would be a fair bit of work to get it working, as some kind of cache would need to be implemented to avoid flooding the API.

The only site I'm aware of that provides this kind of API is http://bibles.org/pages/api. eBible (see earlier issue titles) used to, but no longer does. http://www.esvapi.org/ does, but only for the ESV.

Postponing this issue.

This is a feature request. The highest priority feature for Scripture Filter is preparing a Drupal 8 version. Once a Drupal 8 version is ready, I can then turn my attention to working on improvements. Those would be developed for Drupal 8 first, and then backported.

@tonytheferg expressed an interest in developing exactly this feature over at #3300103: Scripture in pop up. Tony, let's continue this conversation over here.

My main question would be: What API / data source would you use to pull the Bible text in? See #38: bibles.org is the only one I've found. This had new owners; I reached out to them in 2014 and they suggested this could be done using their API. They pointed me to a webpage that now redirects to https://scripture.api.bible/. It's free for non-commercial use, up to 500 consecutive verses at a time, up to 5,000 queries a day.

1. So the code would need some kind of mechanism to check that only short enough passages are being requested. (Long passages aren't really suitable for display like this anyway).
2. Some kind of caching mechanism would be needed to prevent the server requesting the same verses repeatedly - both to prevent slowness and to avoid hitting the 5k queries limit.
3. Indeed, would we want time to first byte ever to be slowed down by the server potentially waiting for multiple API calls? Probably not. So either we do this lazily then insert with AJAX. Or the cache is checked. Verses that are already in the cache are inserted; others are added to a processing queue in the hope that subsequent page visits would find the verse is ready.
4. It would need to fail elegantly if there's any error. But if this isn't synchronous this becomes less of an issue.
5. The Bible text returned would need sanitising to make sure malicious code can't be injected in the page.

Those are the thoughts already in my head. Now someone other than me has expressed an interest in working on this, I'll put those thoughts here, and invite you to share yours.

Maybe we can have a look at this
https://faithlife.com/products/reftagger

reftagger

See my comment in #38 above