Spam: The other white meat

The Hub is a Drupal driven portal for human rights content. There are a variety of really interesting implementations of various aspects that it does, but the one I want to focus on is functionality that was just released that connects user uploaded content back to to the player.

The comparison that I think most people make when talking about flash player is obviously YouTube- though there are now other rivals which perhaps best YouTube at their own game- Vimeo comes to mind. There are a variety of players that people have implemented (Flow Player, JW Player, even Drupal's home grown Media Player) functionality that approximates some of this feature set that seems important- some kind of content exploration that can link the current video to other content on the site.

This has been possible in the JW player through its support for recommended content. The problem, however, was that this was not very extensible and was on the 3.0 platform. Further, generating this content on the fly proved challenging in Drupal for a variety of reasons- for one the format was awkward, and two, it was challenging to figure out how to build that content.

A few things have come into existence in the past bit that make something really fantastic possible on Drupal. On the flash side, the 4.x version of the JW flash player allows us to build plugins that can operate in defined ways inside the player. This means we can have a plugin that builds related content or searches for content. To do this, there are a number of things on the Drupal side that need to be addressed. First, we have a number of improvements to XSPF Playlist, the module which is responsible for generating the XSPF feeds out of Drupal. One is a major improvement to the module structure which makes finding data that can be used on feeds much easier, the other is a small views argument that allows us to filter nodes by whether they can generate XSPF feeds. This allows us to build lists of nodes for the player to play- a small detail, but critical for dynamic content. XSPF Playlist already had a style plugin to format the output, so that piece is tied up.

Secondly, Jacob Sing recently contributed Similar Nodes which creates a taxonomic weighting relationship between nodes. For example, if you have a taxonomy called "fruit", nodes that are tagged as "apple" will be more similar than an node which is "apple" and one that is "pear". It is sophisticated enough to work arross multiple taxonomies, so you can create some pretty neat relationships. And of course, it offers a Views sort option which allows us to display a list that more similar to less similar of the node in question.

Between these two modules (and of course Views!), we have enough to build related content in XSPF format for a player (or just a node list for display on node landing page). All you need to do is pass the node id for the piece of content that you want to generate related content for.

So what does this end up looking like? Well try it out for yourself! The related button is to the right of the time line.

You might have noticed the search icon as well. This is based on the same concept, however, it is using Views Fast Search to pass a keyword argument back to the view. You'll need this patch to get the keyword argument functionality for Views. We created a plugin that just takes the argument entered by the user in the flash player and calls back to the view with this argument as the keyword to filter by.

So, here is what you need:
* Views
* Views Fast Search + patch
* Similar Nodes
* XSPF Playlist
* FLV Media Player (if you want the work for configuring the player done for you)