On June 7th I wrote a mail to syscrusher (but I never received any
response). So I decided to post here to encourage others to comment or
even continue work on this. (I dont have time to work on it myself atm,
but this may change in a few months.) What I suggest is an all-in-one
solution of a links directory.


Hi syscrusher!

A few weeks ago I wrote a simple module to display bookmarks (read
from xml file) with a simple but nice interface. The module is called
XBView (Bookmarks Viewer, http://drupal.org/node/62525). Shortly after
the module was released for 4.7, I got a dozens mails asking for
integration in a larger context. It was a guy named Dmitri Karpatchev
who recently pointed me to the links package you maintain.
Some excerpts from his mail ...

> May I suggest you to develope new module which is based on xbview?
> I like very much module "web-links" from phpnuke, for instanse
http://nukefiles.ru/modules.php?name=Web_Links

> 1. web-links will use more convinient catalogue structures

> 2. browser's xml file will be imported in standard weblink node
> format during import of links.xml you can convert links into weblink
> node used by links module from drupal (http://drupal.org/node/24719)

So I went on to play with weblink and finally started (2 days ago)
with a new module 'xbookmark' (for now) which is very similar to the
weblink module. But with some subtle distinctions ...

- WebLink forces you to have a node body, what makes it useless to
build up a link directory. IMO a weblink should be title and url and
nothing else. Of course you could add some description for the link,
but that must be optional! (I cant guess a description when importing
bookmarks from any file format). xbookmark implements a new node type
with title, url, and optional description, icon and webshot field.

- I modified the xbview parser to import xbel to the new node type.
It automatically creates terms for every bookmark folder found in the
xbel file. (The terms are created in a distinct bookmark vocabulary).

- I though out an interface which makes it possible to write something
like view modules. What means you can include different kinds of
presentation plugins to display the link directory to the user. ATM
we have weblink, xbview and nuke available. (I adapted weblink to work
with the new node type and did some cleanup, esp. the theme functions
needed an update, äh? is_int => element_children).

- All modifications made to the nodes & terms (=folders) can be
exported as well. As we have view extensions, we also have import and
export plugins. ATM only XBEL is available, but other may follow (e.g.
to interface with del.icio.us or similar).

Since xbookmark node type is nearly identical to weblink it should be
easy to migrate the nodes. IMO the module is to succeed weblink and/or
to provide an alternative. There is a endless TODO list and I will
check how this module can/will be maintained. Maybe it can be added to
links package or replace weblink module or stay alone as 'xbookmark'.

To try out the module you need to have links module installed
(links_related and links_weblink are not required). As you will see
the module is in early stages, but there is enough functionality to
play with already. ATM you cant create/edit bookmark nodes directly
because of some bugs, I didnt have time to look for ... so you should
start by importing a sample xbel file (e.g. orig.xml) ... sorry :/

I'm very interested in your opinion on this module and what you
suggest how to proceed. I realized that you did a great job with links
api, but the module(s) definitly needs more work (UI?). I hope we can
somehow cooperate ... I dont plan to use links or xbookmark on my
sites (for now), but I'm willing to spent some more hours on that and
maybe help you maintain the package ... (whatever it will be)

So please let me know, what you think about all that!

I only spent a few hours, so feel free to ignore all this.
But at least the cleanups for weblinks browser should be merged into
links package IMO.

Download XBookmark (alpha-very-unstable-incomplete-version)
http://profix898.de/ftp/public/Drupal/xbookmark0706.zip

Thanks everyone and esp. syscrusher for the great links package.
Regards, Thilo