Will’s Similiblog

I’ve been evolving the news feeds portion of the site, and am quite happy with how it’s working out. Here’s the current configuration:

News feeds are imported using the feedapi module; as Feadapi nodes (rather than using the “lightweight items” option). I’ve restricted news feed creation to admin, to avoid feed bloat; users can suggest additional feeds that might be of interest. I’m importing several feeds of interest to our community.

Feedapi is set to generate Story nodes from individual news items. The feedapi module took a little messing around to get familiar with, but is working well for me now; tho if I weren’t using the Aggregation module for a different function on the site, I’d use it here, instead of feedapi; in which case substitute “Feed item” nodes for “Story” nodes below.

For voting, the Voting_api module is installed, and voting is done thru Extra_voting_forms. Extra_voting_forms is enabled for Story nodes, with the “karma” form displayed in the links section for nodes, as “up only”; one vote is allowed per user (the remainder of the settings remain at default).

The Community_tags module is installed, and is enabled for a vocabulary I’ve titled “news_tags”. In Administer > Content types > Story, Community_tags is enabled inline (safest thing for other node types is to enable it for “block”, so that it’s out of the way on other node types).

Using the Views module, I’ve set up several Views for the generated news-item Story nodes:

“raw news items” filters all published Story nodes, and sorts these in descending order of creation (I’m using a table view here);

“promoted news items” filters all published Story nodes having rec’d at least 3 votes (VotingAPI points vote result (sum) ≥ 3), sorting these in descending order of VotingAPI points vote result (sum).

using the Tagadelic module, I have a news_tags tag cloud, at url …/tagadelic/list/9 where 9 = the vocabulary id#

the coolest display tho, is set up using the Node_cloud module. A page is created in Views, with node_cloud as the page type; with Node creation date as first sort order, and VotingAPI points vote result (sum) as second sort order (both descending). I’ve added two exposed filters - VotingAPI points vote result (sum), and Comment count; both set Optional, at ≥, with operator locked. The default display includes all news items, sorted in descending order of creation date, with font size reflecting the number of votes received. The user can elect to filter the display to include only those news items receiving ≥ x votes, and/or ≥ x comments. I’ve set up an Argument RSS: RSS Feed Selector set at “display all values”, to create an rss feed icon for the page - this feed will include the content as filtered on the page (i.e., it will reflect the user’s use of the exposed filters, so the user might subscribe e.g. to all news items receiving at least 3 votes and at least 1 comment).

Here’s a pic of the resulting page:

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.