Latest Drupal Nodes

Submitted on Sun, 2006-04-23 21:36

  • Here's an example that shows how to retrieve information from a Drupal Database.

  • We'll create a signature that contains a list of the latest 3 published nodes.

    • It can be customized to show more nodes (the height of the image depends on this though).

    • The type of the nodes is also customizable, so you can choose to show posts from your Drupal forums, blogs, stories or whatever else you see fit.

    • The basic query to retrieve the nodes will use db_rewrite_sql, so it automatically deals with node access permissions. We do not wish to show private nodes here ;-).

  • Here we'll use the following image for the background. It is slightly bigger than the one we used before.

  • Create another file called sample_drupal_latest_nodes.png and upload it to your webroot/sig folder, with the following contents:

    <?php
    //
    // Setup relative path to Drupal folder...
    //
    $sig2drupal_path = '../';

    //
    // Setup relative path from Drupal folder to the 'sig' folder...
    //
    $drupal2sig_path = 'sig';

    //
    // How many nodes we wish?
    //
    $nodes_count = 3;

    //
    // Set to TRUE if we wish nodes promoted to frontpage only
    //
    $promoted_to_front = FALSE;

    //
    // Enter list of node types (comma-separated)
    // note each node type must be single quoted!
    // Leave empty to retrive nodes of any type.
    //
    $node_types = "'story','book'";

    //
    // END OF SETTINGS
    // ---------------

    //
    // Change current working directory to the Drupal root path.
    //
    chdir($sig2drupal_path);

    //
    // Initialize Drupal...
    //
    require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
    drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

    //
    // Retrieve the latest active node titles...
    //
    $where = array('n.status = 1');
    if (    $promoted_to_front) {
          $where[] = 'n.promote = 1';
    }
    if (!empty(    $node_types)) {
          $where[] = 'n.type IN ('. $node_types .')';
    }
    $text = array();
    $result = db_query(db_rewrite_sql('SELECT n.title, n.created FROM {node} n WHERE '. implode(' AND ', $where) .' ORDER BY n.sticky DESC, n.created DESC'), $nodes_count);
    while (    $node = db_fetch_object($result)) {
          $text[] = format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'd-m-Y') .' '. check_plain($node->title);
    }

    if (    count($text) <= 0) {
          $text = array(
            "Sorry, I couldn't retrieve the requested information.",
            '',
            ''
          );
    }
    // --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    $image_info = array(
            'image'    => 'sample_drupal_latest_nodes.gif'
    );

    //
    // This could be made a loop, but the vertical offset
    // depends on the height of the font, so...
    //
    $image_text = array(
        array(
                'x'     => 8,
                'y'        => 6,
                'color'    => array(50, 100, 180),
                'font'    => -2,
                'text'    => $text[0]
        ),
        array(
                'x'     => 8,
                'y'        => 21,
                'color'    => array(50, 100, 180),
                'font'    => -2,
                'text'    => $text[1]
        ),
        array(
                'x'     => 8,
                'y'        => 36,
                'color'    => array(50, 100, 180),
                'font'    => -2,
                'text'    => $text[2]
        )
    );

    chdir($drupal2sig_path);
    include(    './includes/dynamic_gd_image.php');
    ?>

  • Again, I commented bits in the code. I hope that helps to understand what's going on...

  • Note there's a slight difference from the previous example (related to phpBB). We're using here chdir to switch from directories. This is because Drupal doesn't have a predefined variable to store its own path. This is configured on top of the script through the variables $sig2drupal_path and $drupal2sig_path. The values (relative paths) assume the directory where you store your signature files is located within the Drupal directory.

  • This is how it looks like:

‹ Last Message Posted sampleupFinal notes ›
» google about it! | delicious | digg | reddit | furl | google | yahoo | technorati