By icstars on

in order to export someone's personal activity into facebook and other social networks, we needed to customize what content gets pushed out on the rss feed. looking at the views_rss.module code, it calls nodeapi which can modify the node teaser and title. our guiding principle was that this kind of formatting code belongs in the node-type.tpl.php file along with all the other code that handles how a node is to be displayed. sample code below.

module code (repeat the if statement for other types or change to switch/case):
function ourmodule_nodeapi(&$node, $op, $teaser = NULL, $page = NULL) {
  if ($op == 'view'){
  	  if ($node->type == 'eventregistration') {
  	  	_phptemplate_callback('node-eventregistration', array('node' => &$node));
  	  }
  }
}

node-eventregistration.tpl.php file

<?php if ((arg(2) == 'feed')):?>
<?php
	$node->teaser = 'Put custom text to be fed to rss here';
	$node->title = 'someone registered for an event';
?>
<?php else: ?>
... snip - standard tpl code

our strategy is to provide a means for users to export their activity from our site to their facebook profile via imported blog/rss feed. unfortunately, that functionality is broken right now, but it HAS to get fixed someday, right?

to do this, we have a simple view that gets teasers of all the content types we want to include in the 'activity' stream for a particular author as an argument, e.g. my_activity/63 gets the activity for user 63. my_activity/63/feed gets the rss feed for the view.

then we customize the tpl of each content type to display the proper text around the content depending on its context - e.g. when viewing on the user's home page, when viewing via rss feed, when viewing in an organic group, etc.

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