Still playing with Drupal as a possible community platform. It's pretty cool, and so I'm starting a series of notes (under "Community") to chronicle my (mis)adventures with it.
One of the things that Drupal does is make everything a "node." It's essentially an item in a database or, for us static-page types, a single page. One of my first challenges was to try to bend this behavior a bit. Drupal has a very nice RSS aggregator, but by default, the headlines for all aggregated items leads to the Drupal pages, um, nodes for those items - only from those pages can you get to the original source. Nice for keeping people on the site, not so nice for people who see something interesting and want to get to it quickly.
Fortunately, the Drupal table that controls this identifies items as really local to the site or coming from an RSS feed, so it's a question of adding some PHP code that basically say "if this comes from a PHP feed, use the item's real URL, not the Drupal node ID for the hyperlink." Done. UPDATE: I just downloaded the beta of a new Drupal version, and I see it does this out of the box. Yay!
Unfortunately, right now, this determination is made inside the "themes" that control page display, which means if we want to give users the ability to control their displays, I'd have to embed the logic in each template set. Now to see if I can bump that decision up a bit, to the core module that controls the themes, so I can add it just once.
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