Drupaltherapy gets married with Feed API

Drupaltherapy has been on the back burner for a good couple of months while I prepared to get hitched on September 12, 2009. It was a nice affair, held at an outdoor education and retreat center equipped with canoes, kayaks, archery, zip lines, kickball fields, square dances, and a whole bunch of other things that make weekend weddings fun for family and friends.

What is making us very happy right now is our use of Drupal as the platform for our wedding website and the use of some specific modules that are doing some cool things for us, too.

We asked guests to share their photos from the weekend using Flickr and our sanctioned wedding tag. We are using Feed API to pull down incoming Flickr posts and create nodes based on each new item, following the steps in my Feed API screencast, and then leveraging Views to make a neat display.

Flickr already provides nice photostream displays and I suppose guests could just look to Flickr to see the collection of tagged photos, but we wanted to draw our family and friends to a central place where we could control more of their experience ourselves. So, to replicate some of the Flickr features we slapped in a Views Slideshow, a recipe also found in one of my screencasts.

We also tried to harness Twitter for something useful wedding-wise, and the best we could come up with is more Feed API tricks to get similarly tagged tweets into one place. We thought that our friends could possibly communicate with Twitter through our site, so we built a little interface that pulls down tagged tweets into nodes with Feed API and also gave anonymous users the ability create nodes direct through our site.

The only people who used this were the two of us and on occasional luddite family member, so it didn't go according to plan.

There probably a bunch of tricks that I could have pulled to make this move smoother, but yeah, I had my head in other places. I did want to put it out there that many of the features found in Drupal and in some contrib modules really go a long way for nailing down the basics of a wedding site and I would be happy to talk to anyone who wants to try it out. Connect with us on the Weddings Group and we can talk there.

Anyway, you'll be seeing more of Drupaltherapy now that the big day has come and gone, starting promptly with a new set of Drupal training sessions in San Francisco on not just one day, but two!.