By cel4145 on

I just posted this to my drupal site and thought someone might be interested in this particular way of using RSS to push content from one drupal site to another:

"One of the advantages of RSS is that you can pull content. But with Drupal's taxonomy_dhtml and syndication add-on modules, it's possible to push it the other way.

So that Terra and I can do some collaborative writing, I setup a new taxonomy on my Drupal site called friends (remember to select "types" and set to "multiple select") with a term "Terra." I then posted a blog test with "Terra" selected.

Next, I did the same on Terra's site, except I made a friends term "Charlie" and posted a test blog .

The trick is to then configure RSS. Using the advanced syndication features, I created a news feed on Terra's site which pulls from category term "Terra" on my site and one on mine which pulls from "Charlie" on hers, both with terms "myfriends."

Next, create bundles on each for my friends. Install the block for each bundle. Now, when Terra or I want to share a blog or story post, we merely tag it from our friends category and it shows up as a link on the front page on the other's site once RSS is updated.

And with the "blog it" feature, it's even easier to send a reply. I can add other Drupal friends as well using the same process. RSS email."

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

this is quite a nice use of Drupal's taxonomy flavored feeds capability. thanks for sharing it.

even more is possible with a future version of import.module which stores feed items as nodes, and does bundles via taxonomy.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

I know. I read something about it in the developer mail archives and was very excited to hear about it. I'm currently working with a new organization, Open Education, and our focus is creating open course learning objects for education. The proposed method of distributing content is via an RSS standard. After looking at Drupal, I've been thinking about how Drupal, with a little modification for the learning object XML template, would work really well for production, distribution, searching, and storing of learning objects fed through RSS.

inerte@inerciasensorial.com.br’s picture

inerte@inerciasensorial.com.br commented

I coded a small example and made the general design of something like a p2p system for drupal nodes.

In theory is very simple, here's an overview:

You create a node. A list of websites interested on this content (module or taxonomy specific) is contacted and a string key is sent. The website receives the key and query back for the content, which is deployed in a xml style.

Something like:

function p2p_insert()
{
$sql_query_for_sites
foreach ($sql_query_for_sites as $key => $website) {
$string_key = _generate_random_key();
fopen ($website . '?p2pkey=' . $string_key)
_store_node_and_key($node, $key);
}
}

Then you wait for the response with the key and output the node.

But there are many features needed to make something appealing for users, mainly taxo support. So for example, Linux news sites could exchange specific content, or a blog could be published on multiple pages, etc, etc...

And there are also many problems, like what $nid would you use, how comments would be shared, the right way for taxo support, modules would have to have custom functions to deal with "imported" content, and some more I can't rememeber.

Anyway, my problem is that I don't have the time to code it, but if anyone wants to talk with me about it and suck what I've thought so far, feel free.

--
Julio Nobrega
http://www.inerciasensorial.com.br

Sébastien Grenier’s picture

Sébastien Grenier commented

We have a couple of web site using Drupal and we want to have one place where everyone goes to submit content. Then smaller and more specific web sites can get fed by the main one. RSS seems ideal solution to perform the task. The ideal thing would be that the feed would be like a story, a book and a event (a node basically) and that each node from the feed could be moderated like any other content publish on the site. With the taxonomy in there, things will rock.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

That sounds great! I'd like to hear more once it's running. For the other project I'm working on, one thought has to been to setup multiple sub-domains for sub-projects. If an improved import.module makes this even easier to do, it'll be easier for me to sell the group on drupal.

mitchbnj’s picture

mitchbnj commented

Juet went to your site. Great Job. OK. My first question, Can you explain how you modified your "style SHeet"s -- next , how would I be able to see the files that you modified. Is it viewable?

Next Stupid question in its own section (Please forgive my verbiage, I havent had time to look in on (or try and fix) my board in over 2 months.

Mitch B
Drupal Newbie, but
CTO and Chief Geek
GameLAND, Inc.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

Hmmm...can't really explain it. The style sheet is really a mess (didn't think about others looking at it). I took a style sheet I had from a PostNuke site that I had already worked with before. Then I looked at a number of Drupal themes and begged and borrowed a little of the CSS definitions. There's still stuff in the style sheet that I'm not using. Just too lazy to go clean it up.

As for the theme, I just built an html template from scratch and then plugged in php where necessary, once again by looking at how the other themes were using function node, comment, etc.

If you want still want to take a look at the theme file after that explanation, send me an email Only local images are allowed.

cel4145 at fsu dot edu