Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module.  It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor.  The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed.  The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank.  (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.)  The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin.  Oops!  I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers.  It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

I just committed a working version of my new OpenSearch Aggregator module to Drupal Contrib CVS.

OpenSearch is a standard by Amazon which allows you to share search results through RSS. The feeds are valid RSS, they just contain extra meta-data for searching. So, you can use OpenSearch with any RSS reader to set up feeds to track tags or keywords for example.

We also have an OpenSearch client module that provides these feeds, and I just updated it to send search relevance information along. So, you could set up 5 Drupal sites with OpenSearch module, and a sixth site with the OpenSearch aggregator. Now, you can search all 5 sites simultaneously, and get a single, ordered list of global results.

However, because OpenSearch is an open standard, it can be used for anything. Amazon's A9 search already offers media search for example. The possibilities really are endless.

The best part? The OpenSearch Aggregator presents its results through the normal search system. So, if you install the OpenSearch module on top of this, you automatically provide OpenSearch feeds for the aggregated search. In other words, Drupal is now a complete OpenSearch processing suite! There is no other CMS out there that can claim this.

More info is on the Drupal.org project page.

[cross-posted from acko.net]