May
15
(2006)
Drupal Content Creation Kit
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: drupal, semanticweb, structuredblogging. | 11 Comments
Drupal 4.7 has an amazing “Content Creation Kit” module available for it (apparently, the module drove much of the node redevelopment between 4.6 and 4.7). It lets you easily create new content types, on the fly, without touching any code. It provides a set of primitives, and you can assemble them however you want - even providing lists of acceptable entries.
This is similar to the Flexinode module that’s been around for awhile now, but Flexinode was apparently a proof-of-concept hack that wasn’t intended to be adopted as widely as it has been, and apparently has scalability issues. CCK is sort of like Flexinode, reloaded. There is even a migration path planned to help folks who are heavily invested in Flexinode to move forward to the “modern” way of doing things.
For a demo project I’m setting up, I just created a new “News Release” CCK content type, with the required “Title” field, a text “Abstract” field, a “More Info” URL, and a “Main Content” field. I could easily add “Release Date”, “Agency” or any other News Release related fields. And, any releases created using the CCK content type would automatically have the appropriate fields and widgets provided.
CCK supports several types of fields:
- date (text field)
- node reference (select list or autocomplete field)
- integer (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
- decimal (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
- text (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
- user reference (select list or autocomplete field)
- web url (text field with URL validation)
When combined with the Views module, you can create pages listing these various CCK content types, displaying whichever fields are appropriate, and providing sorting/filtering tools as desired.
Want to create a Journal Article Review content type? Sure thing! Lesson plan? OK! “Learning Object” reference - maybe even approximating a LOM? Why not? With these primitives available via the web interface (no code required - or even allowed) you should be able to do literally anything… You can even clone/duplicate CCK content types, making it easy to tweak types without breaking existing content.
Seriously cool stuff. Semantically structured content types within Drupal. Kind of like Structured Blogging, but implemented within the structure of the CMS, rather than as a bolted-on xml parsing/generating utility. I’ll be using this on a few projects…
Dec
14
(2005)
Structured Blogging: Semantic web for the rest of us?
Filed under: general. Tags: metadata, plugins, semanticweb, structuredblogging. | 13 Comments
Structured Blogging
Year: 2005
Author: The Structured Blogging Folks
Platform: Other
Category: Utility
Publisher: structuredblogging.org
Price: Free!
I’ve been playing with the Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress for a while now, and just noticed a new version - it’s almost up to the mythical “1.0 release”. They’ve added a bunch of new microcontent types with some great structured metadata appropriate to each type. I’m planning on using structured blogging a lot more in the future.
From the Structured Blogging project website:
Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.
Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog.
Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.
So, it’s an easy to use, flexible way of describing some standard types of things. People. Places. Events. Things. And the metadata is machine readable, enabling some of the early promise of the federated “repositories” by letting people search for stuff anywhere, and find relevant bits easily. The first bits of readily usable semantic web infrastructure.
Here’s a screenshot of the structured blogging microcontent authoring interface for Audio:
There is also a plugin available for MovableType users, if you happen to swing that way *cough*Brian*ahem*
What would be really cool is if a new microcontent type of “learning object” was defined - letting you enter some IEEE LOM-ish metadata about a resource that’s used as a learning object. There’s your learning object repository, thank you very much…
Nov
12
(2005)
Mapping relationships in the Blogosphere?
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: community, foaf, semanticweb, weblogs. | 3 Comments
It would be really cool if Technorati or Bloglines (or Google, or BlogBridge, or Antarcti.ca, or PlumbDesign, or someone else) created a visual relationship mapping tool for the connections between individuals online.
I suppose it would have to be “Identity 2.0″ driven, since people may have more than one online presence (a primary blog, a work blog, a personal blog, a Flickr account, a Del.icio.us account, etc…) and the value is showing relationships between people and not software.
Something like the FlickrGraph for my account - showing visually the relationships in the Flickr community. What if that got extended beyond the borders of Flickrstan?
I suppose a visual interface for a machine-managed FOAF directory based on links rather than explicit declarations would do the trick… What I’m imagining is a way for communities to form automatically and dynamically based on linking - something that may be completely borked thanks to the silly attribute, though…
Bonus points for an alternate view based on Frappr.
Update: Something like Foafnaut (sample display), but I think relying on manually crafted FOAF files is pretty limiting - only hard-core geeks will take part, and what is needed is an inclusive everybody-in-the-pool approach…
Update: Took a first stab at generating a FOAF file using FOAF-a-matic. It’s woefully incomplete, and FOAF only understands one type/level of relationship - everyone is “Friend” - so you can’t say “I work with these people, hang out with these ones, met these ones at conferences, follow these blogs…” So, I’m not sure how useful FOAF would be for mapping relationships. The fidelity is pretty low…
Update: There’s a project to include FOAF support in WordPress, via the Links manager. It also includes support for marking relationships as Trusted via the ratings on the link…