Upcomming plans for Blogs of Indy

Submitted by neil on Sun, 01/25/2009 - 17:26

I haven’t posted an update for Blogs of Indy in a while. I wanted everyone to know that I’ve been hard at work on coding and haven’t had a change to blog out it. Here are some upcoming plans.

FeedAPI Taxonomy Compare Updates. This module is a key piece to the functionality. I spent several hours fixing bugs and adding functionality. Being able to match on synonym will help me keep my menus clean.

Blogs of Indy Custom Module

I added a few tabs to the profile page. One tab is a list of all the blogs for that user. It is basically a copy of the FeedAPI admin page just filter for the user. I filtered it based upon the user argument in the URL. Here is the code for the hook_menu.

$items['user/%user/feeds'] = array(
‘type’ => MENU_LOCAL_TASK,
‘title’ => ‘Blogs’, //Going to be a variable on the main setting page
‘page callback’ => ‘blogsofindy_feedapi_admin_overview’,
‘access callback’ => TRUE, //security is built into the function since this displays on the user profile page
‘page arguments’ => array(1), //pass the account
‘file’ => ‘blogsofindy.feed.user.page.inc’
);
$items['user/%user/feeds/overview'] = array(
‘type’ => MENU_DEFAULT_LOCAL_TASK,
‘title’ => ‘Overview’,
‘weight’ => -10,
);

Here is the page callback code.

Pretty simple really. It’s a copy of the admin display from FeedAPI. What I changed is in Italics. Right after I did this, FeedAPI introduced a view based approach to the page. I have yet to change my code to use a view, though probably a good idea.

Blog Tag Management

As some of you remember, I mentioned that there needs to be an easy way for the blog owners to manage the incoming terms that need to be associated to the categories. I choose to do this by adding a tab to the profile page.

$items['user/%user/feeds/terms'] = array(
‘type’ => MENU_LOCAL_TASK,
‘title’ => ‘Terms’,
‘page callback’ => drupal_get_form,
‘access callback’ => TRUE,
‘page arguments’ => array(’blogsofindy_terms_form’, 1),
‘file’ => ‘blogsofindy.feed.user.page.inc’
);
$items['admin/settings/blogsofindy'] = array(
‘type’ => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
‘title’ => ‘Blogs of Indy’,
‘description’ => ‘Change the settings for Blogs of Indy Custom Module’,
‘page callback’ => ‘drupal_get_form’,
‘page arguments’ => array(’blogsofindy_admin_settings’),
‘access callback’ => TRUE,
‘file’ => ‘blogsofindy_admin.pages.inc’,
);

I have complete the first version of the code for displaying the form but I am not ready to share the validation or submit code. I had to come up with how I wanted to manage the terms. This is when I added the synonym functionality to FeedAPI Taxonomy Compare. The idea is that incoming feed’s tag will match the synonym and attach itself to the category term. So this form will give the users a list of the tags that their blogs are associated to so they can either “link” them to a category by making them a synonym or add the tag as a category. Either way, the posts nodes will be related to a category term and unrelated from a tag term. I’m struggling with giving the user so much power to add categories (and in turn menu items) so easily. Though it would give them a sense of ownership which is what I am looking for.

Either way, here is the code for the form.

function blogsofindy_terms_form($form_state, $account) {
//build SQL statment for tag options
$sql = sprintf(”SELECT DISTINCT td.tid AS tid, td.name AS term_name
FROM {node} n
inner join {term_node} tn on n.vid = tn.vid
inner join {term_data} td on tn.tid = td.tid
WHERE n.uid = %d AND n.type = ‘%s’ AND td.vid = %d
ORDER BY td.name”, $account->uid, ‘feed_item’, variable_get(’blogsofindy_tags’, array(’0′)));

$result = db_query(db_rewrite_sql($sql));
$tags = array();

$categories = array();
$tree = taxonomy_get_tree(variable_get(’blogsofindy_category’, array(’0′)));
foreach ($tree as $key => $term) {
$categories[$term->tid] = _blogsofindy_terms_format($term->name, $term->depth);
}
if (!empty($result)) {
while ($data = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$tags[$data->tid] = t($data->term_name);
}

$form['tags'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’select’,
‘#title’ => t(’List of Tags’),
‘#options’ => $tags,
);

$form['categories'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’select’,
‘#title’ => t(’Category’),
‘#options’ => $categories,
);

$form['merge'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’select’,
‘#title’ => ‘Action’,
‘#options’ => array(
‘1′ => t(’Move posts and all future posts to new Term’),
‘2′ => t(’Move Term from Tags to selected Category’)
),
‘#default_valule’ => ‘1′,
‘#description’ => t(’Moving the Term from Tags to the selected Cateogry will change the parent and vocabulary for the selected Term’),
);

$form['submit'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’submit’,
‘#value’ => t(’Move’),
);
}
return $form;
}

Using a helper function to display the categories in a hierarchy display

/**
* helper function to great the options for the cateogires in a tree format.
* @param string $term
* @param int $depth
* @return string
*/
function _blogsofindy_terms_format($term, $depth) {
$output = $term;
if ($depth > 0) {
for ($i=1; $i <= $depth; $i++) {
$output = ‘-’ . $output;
}
}

return $output;
}

I also added a admin settings page to select which vocabularies to use in the “Tags” and “Category” drop downs on the form.

function blogsofindy_admin_settings() {
//get list of vocabularies
foreach (taxonomy_get_vocabularies() as $voc) {
$options[$voc->vid] = $voc->name;
}

$form['blogsofindy_tags'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’select’,
‘#title’ => t(’Tags Vocabulary’),
‘#options’ => $options,
‘#default_value’ => variable_get(’blogsofindy_tags’, array(’0′)),
);

$form['blogsofindy_category'] = array(
‘#type’ => ’select’,
‘#title’ => t(’Category Vocabulary’),
‘#options’ => $options,
‘#default_value’ => variable_get(’blogsofindy_category’, array(’0′)),
);

return system_settings_form($form);
}

Left to do before initial release

After I finish the code for managing the terms I have to put in place my ideas from my post More Features for the Blogger. I also like Blog.to.it’s idea of integrating twitter. This would give more attention to the arthur. Then comes the decision about where to display what. I want to be sure to reconize the blogger but don’t want to make the page to busy. Then comes theming which I haven’t even begun to learn yet. There you go, more to come