Before I got totally swamped in the preparation of Drupalcon Szeged, I was playing with a module that uses a nodeAPI implementation for extra RSS fields, similar to Ian Ward's "views rss extra maker" in the developmentSEED sandbox. This Monday I finally committed it. The module leverages the Views 1.0 field interface to give users control over the fields that will be displayed. It needs a minor patch to views_RSS (to add the $view variable when invoking the nodeAPI) to be able to do it's thing (nested tags, only specified fields). It also supports CCK fields with multiple values.
It adds 3 new field selectors to the field interface:
- "all_fields" that adds all fields of a node (like Ian's module)
- "field_groups_start" that opens a tag for nested XML
- "field_groups_end" that closes a tag for nested XML
It then adds only those node fields that you specified in the field interface and outputs them between tags derived from the field label. In theory it should give a non-programmatic interface that allows users to adopt the information that is outputted in a feed to the disparate standards out there (it might still need some tweaking for this e.g. it doesn't support media fields). I created it however in the first place to make it possible to transfer information from CCK fields between sites using the feed element mapper module and the feedAPI. So far my role in the company allowed me to get away without having to dive into the CVS repository. It's not all that long ago that I was saying that I probably would never be a developer. But I can't let my colleagues have all the fun ;) So I made the plunge, but after some funky error messages with TortoiseCVS (yes I'm still on a Windows machine), that got me pretty frightened of messing up the repository, I procrastinated over committing the module. Until today I finally sat down with my colleague Kornel, who's one of our Linux guru's, to navigate the CVS oceans. So thank you Kornel and also thank you Ian Ward and colleagues at developmentSEED for their patience.
