Alex UA's blog

Jody just created a small patch for FeedAPI that added a filter to Views for "Filter by Parent Term," which allowed me to create a new way to sort through the massive amount of videos that have been coming in via the various Drupal themed video feeds that I've been able to find. Before, FeedAPI only had an option to "Filter by Parent Feed", which only accepted the feed's node id and which made it pretty unusable as an exposed filter. But now that it is working, I present to you, the Wall O' Drupal Video Feeds. This is mostly just a proof-of-concept as I try to work through different ways to organize helpful and informative Drupal videos (espescially instructional videos), but I hope it's useful on its own as well!

Update: The "wall o' feeds" is now known as the Drupal Video Planet

ZivTech is extremely excited to announce our participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Jody and I, along with Aaron Winborn and Roger Filomeno, are mentoring the project Views as Web Widget, which will be worked on by Utah State University student John Snow. At the end of this project you should be able to turn your Drupal Views output into java, opensocial, and facebook widgets, and your site should be able to serve them out as XML feeds. I believe that this project truly has the potential to push Drupal to another level, as it can allow people to publish from their Drupal site to any number of other sites with ease. As Aaron noted in his post Drupal will Explode your Site into a Million Pieces, and Why You Want That:

Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

Anyway, I'll be sure to write more about the project as the summer progresses, but for now I just wanted to end by saying congrats to John Snow, and THANK YOU to google for funding this initiative, and to all the hard working Drupalistas (most of all Webchick) who have helped Drupal to accept 21 awesome students, whose projects promise to bring an amazing amount of new features and functions to Drupal

The following is a HOWTO I just submitted to the Drupal.org Handbook

It is now easy to create feeds of embedded third-party videos on Drupal sites using a combination of CCK, Embedded Media Field, FeedAPI, & the FeedAPI Element Mapper modules.

1. Enable the following modules and sub-modules: CCK, Embedded Media Field, Embedded Video Field, FeedAPI, FeedAPI Mapper, Common Syndication Parser or SimplePie Parser, FeedAPI Node, & (if you plan on using views with your feeds) FeedAPI Node Views. Make sure to give yourself the correct permissions in the access control admin page.
2. Create a content type that includes an embedded video field. Once you add the field in is suggested that you select "thumbnail" or "thumbnail with thickbox" to avoid loading too many videos on pages with teaser lists. You can use FeedAPI Node's default content type, called feed, or you can create your own and designate it as a feed in the content type settings page.
3. Under admin/settings/feedapi it is suggested that you remove

I'm extremely excited to announce a big step for this small firm: as of last week Jody Hamilton and I officially became business partners. I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I didn't partner with Jody Hamilton the wrestler (pictured - you'll have to google it, I don't want to help his search ranking), though Jody is one mean developer and I hear she occasionally does wear a mask. I met Jody at a Drupal meetup in Philly this past winter, started following her blog, and was immediately struck by how smart of a developer she is. Every time I would meet her in person and tell her about some problem I was having--almost always involving a module that wasn't behaving or a behavior that didn't have a good module--and she would offer me a simple and elegant solution on the spot. As we got to know each other better it became apparent that we both were in need of working with someone like each other, and during DrupalCon we formally decided to merge our efforts. Jody's main role will be something along the lines of Lead Developer, while I will take on a more business oriented role (though we will both remain developers for the foreseeable future).

As with many Drupal firms, one thing that we've decided from the getgo is that we will aim to use 20% of our time on projects that have a direct positive effect on the Drupal project, which will include developing modules, writing documentation, helping at the Dojo, and more. As we grow and bring on new people we will also encourage our employees to do the same.

Today was the last official day of DrupalCon Boston 2008, the latest official iteration of the biannual Drupal Conference (it alternates every six months between the U.S. and Europe). I had extremely high expectations for the week, and the conference still managed to exceed them. The power of bringing people together under one roof never ceases to amaze me, espescially when those people are used to collaborating online. I can't even begin to imagine what amazing new innovations and directions will emerge as a result of the last four days. I personally was involved in four initiatives:

• There were two amazing media handling meetups, led by CivicActions' Arthur Foelsche, who is also the creator and maintainer of the truly awesome new family of modules that make up Media Mover and Roger Lopez who created and maintains the great Asset Module, by far the most promising file handler I've come across for Drupal. Also in attendance were Feed API's Alex Barth and Aaron Winborn who created the emfield module, which I help to maintain. I'm sure there will be a post covering the sessions in greater detail, but the biggest thing to come out of the session was that we all agreed to work together to make all of these modules work well together. We have already figured out the Feed API integration, which allows people to automatically create video, audio, and image nodes from the feeds of emfield supported providers, and Roger has already started implementing the integration of Asset and emfield, which should be done very soon (he already has two providers available, and more are coming). Tomorrow there is a big code sprint, and we're hoping to finish integrating these four amazing modules, which will be a huge step for Drupal's media handling capabilities (which happens to be Drupal's most requested improvement).