Will’s Similiblog

I’m trying out a navigation solution to my featuritis dilemma. As I’ve got 3 major features on my site - [1] a community blog, [2] aggregated news feeds, and [3] an aggregation of forums postings from selected forums in an associated Moodle course support platform (I’ll describe this, and the reasons for it, in a subsequent post) - each with multiple views - the comprehensive navigation for all 3 features together was growing cumbersome, with a rather lengthy side column of menu blocks.

So - I’ve created a front welcome page using a “Page” node, with a menu block linking to each of these 3 sections of the site; and added links as well to my 3 sections in the “primary” menu, which displays below the header on all page views.

The side-column menu blocks relating to the Community Blog should show up on the various views of the Community Blog “section” of the site, but should not show up on the views relating to Aggregated News or the Aggregated Forums, & v/v. To accomplish this, I’ve set up custom block visibility for these views.

On the Blocks Administration page, to manage block visibility, click on the selected block’s configure link. At Show block on specific pages:, select Show if the following PHP code returns TRUE (PHP-mode, experts only). Paste in the equivalent of:

<?php
$match = FALSE;
$types = array(’blog‘ => 1);
if (arg(0) == ‘node’ && is_numeric(arg(1))) {
$nid = arg(1);
$node = node_load(array(’nid’ => $nid));
$type = $node->type;
if (isset($types[$type])) {
$match = TRUE;
}
}
$url = request_uri();
if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
return $match;
?>

The first criterion - $types = array(’blog‘ => 1); - will include this block on all single-node pages where the node is a blog entry.

The second criterion - if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) { - will include this block on all pages where the URL contains the string blog/. I’ve set up the various Views of the community blog, in their Views settings, to have the url blog/… (e.g., blog/communityblog_listview, &c.).

The third criterion - if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) { - will include this block on the tagadelic tag-cloud page that lists my blog-specific taxonomy (but will not include it on the tagadelic pages displaying taxonomy specific to news aggregation &c.)

This was repeated for each of the side blocks that I want to see displayed on the Community Blog related pages of my site; these will now show up when the user is navigating through pages related to the Community Blog, but will not show up if the user is in other “sections” of the site.

Side-column menu blocks for the other sections of the site are similarly configured, to display menu items specific to the News section only on the pages dealing with aggregated news, &c.

I like it - it works ;^)

Have also been playing with drigg, a ‘Digg clone’ written as a Drupal (5.x) module suite. Works very much like Pligg, reviewed in my last post. Voting is done using the drupal votingapi, with extra_voting_forms as the interface. In addition to accepting individual submissions, like Pligg, drigg will import rss feeds, and has a very nice feed import interface. The rss import function depends on the default drupal ‘Aggregator’ module, with the addition of some custom code in the drigg module itself. A provided theme gives a Drigg/Pligg-like look & feel.

I had no trouble setting up an installation & getting feeds to import.

My sense is, after playing a bit with both drigg and Pligg, that if a dedicated Digg-like “social-ratings-of-submissions & feed items” site is desired, without the need for added functionality, I’d go with Pligg; if there is reason to integrate this with other functionality that could be provided by other drupal modules, drigg will perform the same tasks quite nearly as well within a drupal installation. The module suite is under active development, and has come into its present state quite quickly, so I’d keep an eye on it.

Currently, I have a site set up as a dedicated drigg installation; I’ll be messing around with integrating this into one portion of a more comprehensive drupal installation, to see how well it might integrate with other drupal functionality. Drigg’s feed import functionality depends on the default drupal ‘aggregator’ module, which does not play well with the very elegant ‘aggregation’ module I’m using on my social learning platform for aggregation of users’ distributed content; so this strange need I feel to aggregate two different types of content separately on my site may leave me in a pickle (perhaps I need to use Drupal’s multisite and multisite_login capability, & create 2 sites with single sign-in, each using the Aggregation module to its own ends, one to handle aggregation of news and 3rd-party submissions with social ratings, and one to handle users’ distributed content with comment-density surfacing of content? - perhaps I’m just nuts).

For drigg in action, see here:
http://www.drigg.org/
or here:
http://www.fsdaily.com/

I’ve been playing around with Pligg, and have a test installation up at http://pligg.similibus.org, to mess around with. A pretty nice out-of-the-box social-ratings-of-submissions (Digg-like) platform.

The user interface for submission of individual items is very straightforward, esp. with the “pligg this page” bookmark function. It’s also possible to import feeds, as administrator - by enabling the optional/included “RSS Importer” plugin. So this is a decent choice for aggregating distributed user-content item-by-item, along with user submission of 3rd party items and administrator-chosen feeds, with promotion by social ratings.

There’s a lot more flexibility (with concurrent complexity) in what can be muckled together in Drupal, but if this does what is needed, it’s an easy and elegant installation. I’m still a bit muddled re how well social ratings will work for surfacing of user-submitted material in an academic community (I’m intrigued with the option of comment density as the surfacing algorithm) - but for surfacing of material submitted from 3rd-party sources, this will do nicely.

Would be great to create easy user db integration / single sign-on capability with other cms’s (moodle, drupal &c.), so’s to be easier to integrate this into a learning management system suite.

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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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[ok, I did skip #13 - but hey, I just recently suffered site outage, and (fortunately temporary!) loss of a domain name, when my (former) hosting company went belly-up one Saturday morning without notice - so perhaps I can be forgiven a little superstitious behavior!]

In addition to the user-contributed material on my site (blog posts in the community blog & in satellite groups; attachments to blog posts displayable in a mini-portfolio; and aggregated distributed content from user blogging on other platforms), I wanted to provide some focused 3rd party feeds - health news from the BBC and NPR, Terry Gross’s wonderful Fresh Air interviews, feeds from the Centers for Disease Control, &c. I’ve been providing these on the front page of our Moodle platform using Moodle’s rss aggregation module as a sideblock, but thought it might be interesting to add some features to these imported feeds - such as threaded discussion on selected news items, and social rating of news stories with ranking/surfacing of voted-up content.

I’ve played around with ways of doing this. Recently I’ve been playing around with Tony Mobily’s most excellent Drigg module for Drupal, & may have more to say about that later on a bit, after more of a trial. My present implementation tho, is muckled together from other Drupal plugins.

As the Aggregation module is employed for other purposes on the site, I added a 2nd feed aggregating module. After trying out several options, I ended up using the feedapi module. This does not have the full set of features available in the Aggregation module, but it is serving reasonably well for this purpose. With a little care in naming of node-types, these two aggregators seem to play well together. The feedapi module is configured to create Story nodes from the feed items, and these Story nodes are organized for display in various formats using the Views menu.

For social ranking of news items, I have the votingapi module installed, and the voting interface is configured using extra_voting_forms (I’ve also tried fivestar, which works nicely as well; it just comes down to a preference re user interface). This is set up to permit voting up/down of Story nodes containing news item content. Comments are enabled for the Story node.

I’ve also enabled the community tags module for Story nodes, to permit users to tag stories with terms relevant to our user community.

In addition to the pages displaying the raw news items, I’ve set up a page for “promoted” stories, with a views filter set for VotingAPI points vote result (sum) greater than or equal to a chosen value (in the sandbox site, I’ve set this at ≥2; in a site with more active members it could be set higher).

Users can now easily access relevant 3rd-party material (news feeds, feeds from 3rd-party blogs of interest, &c.); scan for relevant news items & read these; rate them according to interest/relevance to our learner community; and engage in discussion on the items. A table-view of feed items is header-sortable by user-ranking, number of comments, &c. & Items voted up in interest appear on the “promoted stories” page.

I currently have restricted the creation of new feeds to administrator; eventually I plan to open this to faculty, and it might be interesting to open it to the community at large.