Slot Machine

The Slot Machine module allows you to schedule your content by 'slotting' nodes into different queues. The main building blocks of the module are topics and feature types. Topics correspond to pages or channels, for example 'sport', 'entertainment', 'world' on a news site. You create a vocabulary with the channel names as terms and then set this vocabulary as the slot machine vocabulary. Feature types are slots within those pages and correspond more or less to content types, e.g. ‘article’, ‘video’, ‘review’, etc.

Administrators can modify the update frequency of each slot (either by a time interval or a time of day), configure content in certain slots to rotate to other slots of the same type, and reorder the queue of nodes awaiting scheduling for each slot. (Javascript is required for the administrator UI.)

For output of the content there is a menu callback whose path depends on whatever you set this to be in the settings – so when you go to channels/entertainment, for example, it will display the current node for each slot in the entertainment channel. There are two theme functions used to display content for this path, depending on whether a channel name is passed in or not. There is also an API function that can be used to get the current node in a particular slot.

Slot Machine also integrates with Views, which can be used to display the node live in a particular slot, all of the live nodes in a particular topic, and an assortment of other options.

This module generalizes the original slot machine module created for FastCompany.com, built by Marco Carbone of Advomatic and sponsored by Fast Company/Mansueto. Abstracting the code and initial commit to CVS was done by Katherine Bailey of Raincity Studios, sponsored by NextScreen.

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