I am a devoted Drupal fan and I try to follow developments for Drupal as much as I can. There is actually too much development happening to try it all out and to stay on top of it all, but I still want to share a couple of items I think could be relevant for UBC. I will mention a couple of developments in
UBC Events is a great tool which lets event providers (UBC units, student associations etc.) publish their events into a central events calendar. It comes with tagging and various feeds that allow you to aggregate the content or publish content automatically on your own blog or website. The simplest use case is that you would like to follow a specific event provider or all events within a certain category. UBC Events works great for that!
Our requirement was a little more complex and unfortunately could not yet be met out of the box through UBC Events itself, at least I did not find the solution. However, with a powerful CMS such as Drupal, the functionality can easily be extended to meet other needs.
For years I had planned to explore Yahoo Pipes. It looks incredibly promising, but as so often I have not come around to spend much time with the tool. Today I intend to change this. Let’s build our first few pipes for UBC.
What are Pipes?
Essentially, Yahoo Pipes allows you to build data mashups in a graphial interface without any programming knowledge. It can work with a variety of source data, take user input, perform operations such as sorting, filtering etc. and output the new data in several different output formats, including badges or feeds (RSS, JSON, XML).
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