Drupal modules I wish existed
I’ve been working with Drupal for the last month in order to migrate an existing public library website into Drupal as sort of a test of Drupal as a CMS. I migrated the same site into WordPress and have been doing a comparison of the two. One issue I’ve encountered with Drupal is a lack of modules for Drupal 6.x which draw data from external sources. Modules that work like the WordPress plugins that use shortcodes. For example John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for WordPress.
There is no similar module for Drupal and it is driving me mad. Basically the idea behind this type of module is to insert stuff into Page nodes. This is done by putting a tag into the page which then gets processed on the backend. I think of these as “filter modules” in Drupal. Some of these exist but not enough of them IMHO. Some interesting modules that do this kind of thing include:
I want to convert John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for WordPress into this kind of module for Drupal but really don’t have a good enough understanding of Drupal to write the necessary code at this point. Doing something similar with OCLC numbers and WorldCat Search API would be cool too.
Karen,
“I want to convert John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for WordPress into this kind of module for Drupal but really don’t have a good enough understanding of Drupal to write the necessary code at this point. Doing something similar with OCLC numbers and WorldCat Search API would be cool too.”
Done! I’m putting the finishing touches on it but here is the code:
http://github.com/rubinsztajn/book-post-module/tree/master/openlibrary.module
I’d eventually like to turn it into a module that includes other kinds of functionality that might be helpful when including posts about books in Drupal, e.g incorporating the Google embedded viewer api, frbr-like edition matching using LibraryThing’s thingISBN, and OpenLibrary search API.
I’ll let you know when the module is ready for download.