Views

Create RSS Feeds of Search Results with Views 2

Varun — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:07:39 -0500

Recently, while working at requirements for a Government client I was tasked with finding a way to create rss feeds for site wide searches. Here, I've decided to share this solution with the wider community.

Being able to subscribe to search results with RSS is useful to sites such as twitter.com where there is a large amount of content or frequently updated information. When a user may only be interested in a small sub-set of all this information, it may be useful to offer them an RSS feed. RSS feeds help to make it more convenient for people to stay up to date with changes to content on a website.

To accomplish this, I've used Views 2 to create a new search page for performing a site wide search. In addition to views, the following modules also had to be enabled: PHP input filter, Search, and Views UI. In this example, I've used the devel generate module to generate a large set of nodes on which to test my search.

Step 1. Build the page view

The page view will replace the core search module's search block and page. Begin by creating a new page view. As fields, add "Node: Title" and "Node: Teaser". As filters, use "Node: Published" and the important one, "Search: Search Terms". This search filter hooks into the drupal core search and must be exposed to allow users to enter search terms. I've set the path as 'search-site'. It is also advisable to turn the pager on(It comes in handy later).

Add "Search: Score" under sort criteria and ensure it is set to descending.

Note that search results are only indexed when CRON is run. If you are not seeing any results, please run cron.

Since we want to direct users to our new search page, the core search block should be disabled.

Step 2. Build the rss view

Next, we add a feed display to the view. Most of the settings will be the same as those of the page view, however, in addition, we must also set "RSS Feed" as the Style and "Node" as the Row Style(under basic settings). I've set this path as 'search-rss'.

Step 3. The PHP used to tie them together.

So at this point we have two pages we can look at, YOURDOMAIN/search-site and YOURDOMAIN/search-rss. Both of their content changes based on text which is passed in through the URL where "keys" is set as some text after the ? in the URL.

To put these two pages together we must create a link from the 'search-site' page to the 'search-rss' page so that variables that are being passed in through the URL are preserved. To do this I've added the following PHP to the header of the views page that was set up.

<?php

$view = views_get_current_view();

$rss_url = 'search-rss?keys='.$view->exposed_input['keys'];
$rss_icon = theme_feed_icon( $rss_url , $view->exposed_input['keys']);
echo "<div>";
echo "<p>Current search yields ".$view->total_rows ." results. " ."<br/>Save your search and get periodic updates ".$rss_icon ;
echo '<span><a href="http://www.whatisrss.com"> [What is this?]</a></span></p>';
echo "</div>";

?>

The code simply grabs the current view's exposed input ("keys") and creates a link to the rss page. theme_feed_icon() creates that nice orange RSS symbol for me.

The variable $view->total_rows is only available when pagination is enabled.

The result is a new search page for the site that will also give you an rss feed based on the terms that were searched for.

An export of the view is here.

Here are two more screenshots:

FOSS Workshop and Presentation on CCK & Views in Drupal

Varun — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:19:57 -0400

Last week Dr. Sameer Verma invited me to give a presentation on using Drupal's CCK & Views modules at an all day open workshop he was giving to promote FOSS use in preparation for Software Freedom Day 2009 here in Jamaica. It is very nice to see Drupal being recognised as a substantial member of the FOSS comunity.

Kieran of Acquia also blogs about Dr. Verma's use of Drupal in a course at the San Francisco State University where business students are taught to build online businesses using Drupal. The workshop took place in a seminar room at the Mona School of Business at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. The workshop also touched on the following topics: Voip/Asterisk, LTSP/Ubuntu, CMS/Drupal and Education/Sugar.

Asterisk allows attached telephones to call one another, and allows connections to other telephone services such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services.

LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) allows the Ubuntu operating system to be tailored to the needs of large organisations. We saw a demonstration of a LTSP server that was installed in 30 minutes and used to boot networked thin client desktops with a custom Ubuntu desktop environment. The thin client passed along the bulk of its processing needs to the main server.

Drupal is the content management system of choice here at OpenConcept. Dr. Verma introduced Drupal concepts such as modules, themes, and multisite installs. I followed up with a quick section on using the very powerful and popular CCK and Views modules in Drupal. I was able to demonstrate how easily one can use these modules to create useful website features such as a photo gallery. My talk went well because the audience seemed very interested and they engaged me with several good questions. One such question asked about how views can take in arguments. It was good to see members of the local Drupal group present.

It is always a positive learning experience for me to share my experience and to hear about how other members of the community are using Drupal.

Photo originally from DevelopmentSeed

This Drupal segment was followed with a quick demonstration of the Sugar environment. “Sugar is the desktop environment originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child computer/education project.”(wikipedia). An OLPC project has been started here in Jamaica at the August Town Primary School. The project will equip third grade students with OLPC laptops to be used as high quality educational tools for them. In this effort, Dr. Verma is also training teachers to use this technology.

I went along with the team involved in this OLPC project to visit the August Town Primary School. It is summer time now so no kids, but I did snap a few photos, seen below.

An OLPC laptop "in the field" at the August Town Primary School.

Sameer Verma(right) of SF State University and Maurice McNaughton(left) of the Mona School of business discuss OLPC project details at August Town Primary School in August Town, Jamaica.

Creating a drupal photo gallery site with cck and views

Varun — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:23:01 -0500

In this blog entry I outline the process I used to develop a fully functioning web gallery for my photography with drupal5. With good old google search by my side, being the great wealth of knowledge that it is, this turned out to be a simple process of just following a few tutorials.

Find a suitable theme

First off I wanted to find a suitable theme, something simple yet stylish. I was looking for a dark grey or black minimalist background so as not to distract from the impact of the images. I settled on this theme

The Banner

Next I needed to create a suitable banner to use. The glossy effect seems to be a winner these days so
a bit of searching pointed me to a suitable photoshop tutorial.

The cck and views tutorial

Anyway, back to drupal, for maximum flexibility and control, I decided I wanted to accomplish my photo galleries with cck and views instead of using a specific dedicated module such as the gallery module. I followed the steps in this tutorial here

I changed the 'views_bonus' module to limit width of the column layout to three images and also limited the view to show 6 nodes per page in order to stick to the photographers' "rule of thirds".

Additional notes

I also installed the simplenews module to keep a mailing list current with updates to the site's galleries.
In my own aesthetic crankiness, I also decided that I didn't like how the image module was auto cropping my thumbnails, so, I went through and replaced all the square thumbnails that imagecache had created with slightly differently cropped versions of my own. I placed these new image thumbnails in the suitable location in the files/imagecache folder.

The end result can be seen by browsing here : http://www.varunbaker.com

Information Made Visible: Using the Google Maps View in Drupal 5

ethan — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:29:15 -0400

The views module is a very powerful way of displaying information stored in nodes. Coupled with CCK for creating custom content types, it is possible to store and visualize data in very interesting ways. One of these ways is displaying location information on an embedded Google Map using a view type provided by the Gmaps module.

The location module associates physical address information with nodes so that content can be localized. It will also automatically geocode physical addresses - that is, turn street addresses into latitudes and longitudes - using various geocoding services. We've had success using Google's service.

Geocoding is an important step - the map will not draw markers without a longitude and latitude. If you have everything set up correctly, adding a street address and postal code and submitting the changes should automatically populate the latitude and longitude fields. Sometimes it can be finicky; for instance, if the street address and postal code do not match, but in general it works. Another issue arises when importing a large number of nodes. Sometimes the automatic geocoding does not run, but can be prompted by submitting the node manually or perhaps by republishing on mass.

Once your nodes have longitudes and latitudes, make a page view using the Gmap view type. Add the Location:Longitude and Location:Latitude fields, and then filter for the content type you wish to view. Once you've done that, the view should show a Gmap with markers representing the nodes.

Modules Required:

Gmaps
Location

Steps:

Add location information to the content type (admin/content/types/[content type]) - be sure to include the latitude and longitude fields, and most likely the street address and postal code if you need to geocode them to get lat/long.
Add the content you wish to display with address information, and ensure then lat/long fields are automatically being populated.
Create a view using the Gmaps type, adding the lat/long information as fields and filtering for your content type.
Enjoy!

Guelph NDP Website Outlines Potential for Multi-site Install and Views/Panels Derived Content

ravipjoshi — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:54:15 -0400

Well, in my spare time working with the Guelph NDP, I've redesigned the Riding Association's website. Previously, it was a Drupal 4.7 install, with separate sites for the RA, the Guelph NDP Youth, and the Tom King campaign. This raises a critical issue: if content needs to be used more than once, do you really want to input that content on each site? Namely podcast material that is useful for the Youth, RA and campaign.

A recent solution has been developed in the body of the panels module. Along with the views module, we are able to create what I would call a "family" of views/panels for each purpose. The Tom King campaign has a couple view dedicated to generate the podcast, and a main page generated with panels, accessing content from his blog.

This will help with content generation I might add. Because there is so little content being generated by each one alone, together they are more likely to generate enough content to keep the target audience interested. Once again, there is a lot of content that is relevant for all of the groups, which is best not to be created and recreated.

Something that needs to be sorted out with Drupal, is the usage of different (sub)domain names that can forward to a particular page. That is:

openconcept.ca will use 'node' as its homepage

raviisreallycool.openconcept.ca will use 'aggregator' as the homepage

raviisreallycool.net will use 'node/23' as its homepage

Note: none of these will redirect! I can see this happening if one could hard code the home page variable into the settings.php file. That way each one could use their own settings file accessing the same url, but with slight differences in the settings.

So far the Youth site is not moved over, but I suspect it will be within the next few days.