[drupal-devel] [ann] flickr_block.module

[Kristjan Jansen]

I contributed a flickr_block.module.  Since I am crippled with day
job, perhaps somebody wants to move on with this project? Jonas?

Screenshot
----------------
http://trip.ee/files/images//flickr_block_demo.png

Readme
------------
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/contributions/modules/flickr_block/README.txt
:
Flickrblock is a simple module what generates blocks of Flickr images. 
It is proof-of-concept and not yet ready for mainstream use (no proper
access control and
error handling yet)

Currently 2 blocks are generated:

 * 'Related Flickr Images' will show up on taxonomy/term/x pages. In
addition for term name, the synonyms are also considered (should also
'related terms' be matched?) The block is useful f.e. travel sites
where in each destination page the related  images are shown in
sidebar, http://www.43places.com and http://technorati.com style
   
 * 'My latest Flickr images' shows just stream of latest images added,
matching the Flickr ID

Fetching the XML is done by Drupal's new excellent xmlrpc() function,
it is favoured over REST because of cleaner code (oh please make the
'external l()' patch to the core ;)

PHP parsing is done by xml_parse_into_struct() and helper function
that converts the
struct into a a more usable nested array. The array structure might be
too complicated
though, looking for suggestions for simplifing the structure


Demo
--------
http://kika.trip.ee (unstable now, come back later)


Todo & Future
-------------
 
 * 'See more pictures' link
 * CC licence link
 * access control
 * error handling
 * caching (should we cache xml, transformed array or images?)
 * CSS classes
 * image theme/CSS unification with image.module
 * introduce configuration
   * number of images be fetched
   * move all flickr paths to configuration (they have changed their
url schemas already!)
 * more blocks
   * blog block (requires separate flick_user_id for each user);
   * my latest photosets 
  * testing, testing, testing
 

In future, I'd like to see this module integrated to Jonas' flickr.module 
http://drupal.org/node/14912 after some more integration:

 * unified naming conventions
 * unified configuration
 * unified xml parsing
 * unified caching


k