Neighborhood CCK Release

The newly released Neighborhood CCK module will take the place of Video CCK, replacing that module and expanding it with Video Neighborhood, Image Neighborhood, and the upcoming Audio Neighborhood.

If you don't already know about Video CCK, this module allows an editor to paste a URL or embed code from a third party video provider, such as YouTube or Revver, into a node field, and the module will parse the code, automatically extract the provider and video code, and display the video as configured. It is fully integrated into CCK and Views, to give administrators the ease and power they want in determining how it's displayed. It supports nearly a dozen providers, with more to come, and offers resizable thumbnails and autoplay (as available from the providers).

So now I've extracted the engine from that to drive two more modules. If you're already using Video CCK, I've tried to make the migration path as painless as possible. You'll need to remove the video_cck directory, install the new Neighborhood CCK (ncck) folder, activate the new module at admin/build/modules, and run update.php. All existing fields, settings, and content created by Video CCK will be preserved.

Hopefully this will be the last time this needs to happen. Because there are a number of production sites using Video CCK already, I'll continue maintaining as a stand alone version as well, but I strongly encourage folks to migrate to the new module, and I do not plan to maintain that module into Drupal 6.

Image Neighborhood does what Video Neighborhood does for images. It currently only supports Flickr, but works in the same method, so that editors may paste a Flickr photo URL into the field, and the module will extract the image and display it properly. I plan to implement more image providers as well, perhaps SnapFish and others.

Audio Neighborhood will do the same for audio streams and files: Last FM, etc.

The engine is designed to be easily extensible, so that adding a new provider is relatively painless -- we just create a new include file, using the hooks provided by the module. The hardest part is writing the regular expressions to parse the URL's, and that's not really that hard. Some providers, such as Flickr and YouTube, require API keys to properly access their files -- global settings for those are found at /admin/content/ncck. There, the administrator may also turn off providers they wish, as well as configure other settings.

To use this module, just create the fields you wish as normally for CCK. There are several options available in the field settings screen, such as thumbnail size, autoplay, and field-specific allowed providers. Everything else happens automatically. You can create views with the field from there. You'll probably also want to go to the content type display settings page as well to configure how your teasers are displayed.

You can see demos at Drupal Hub Videos and Drupal Hub Photo Gallery. Note that the module is still in beta, so there will probably be frequent updates required as we work through the issue queues (feel free to jump in). You should be safe using it, however, as there are many production sites I'm aware of that use it. If you use it in a site, feel free to contact me; I plan to build a list of sites using the module and showcasing them when I write a more comprehensive tutorial.

Aaron Winborn
Advomatic, Advocacy Automated -- Web Design for Progressive Advocacy, Grassroots Movements, and Really Cool Causes

(Cross-posted at Drupal Groups.)