Drupal for Facebook

Hi All,

First of all , my thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project - I've been developing an application using drupal for facebook, and fb for drupal is a great piece of work.

I'm quite new to Drupal development, but there are a couple of additions I need to make, and would appreciate some community input (and hope that I may be able to contribute some code).

When rendering a swf, fbml requires the use of the <fb:swf tag, so standard swf rendering will obviously fail. I'm working with the flashnode module a which uses swftools. I'm by no means an expert in the drupal framework, so I wonder if anyone might like to weigh in ...

An obvious place to start is a fb_swf module for swftools. Keeping swf rendering encapsulated within swf() function.

But of course the issue is to know when swf() rendering is for facebook. When rendering with a view type, you could just implement this directly explicitly telling swf() to render for facebook.This might be adequate for, say, a simple block rendering of a flashnode node for facebook.

But the general problem as I see it, is how far module code can be reused when standard rendering won’t work in facebook? And a more general problem might be to support rendering for multiple platforms – netvibes/myspace/opensocial etc.

But specifically in the case of rendering a flashnode for drupal without duplicating code from the flashnode module, there’s two instances when swfs are renderer:

1. rendering directly to a node.
2. using the swfnode filter that takes inline [swf:nid= … ] and renders the swf of the specified flashnode specified (by nid).

So brainstorming a couple of approaches:

1) Globally, iis there a mechanism by which the swftools can know that it’s being called from a view that requires drupal? If so the swftool smodule could be modified to deal with this all at once.

2) Or is there a mechanism by which the view can communicate to the rendering module that it’s rendering in a facebook view? Changes could be then made at the flashnode level (and any other view that renders with swftools)

3) I have research to do on the above, but if the architectural implications of the above are too great, then it remains to render entirely within views. For an individual flashnode, I don’t see much to do except re-render the entire node. However for a non-flashnode that used the flashnode filter ([swf, nid= …]) to embed the swf , is might there a way to override this filter with a swf for facebook filter?

4) And of course the final option is a fully custom module, which I may need to do anyway.

Would welcome your thoughts,

Best Regards,
Ian
Subaltern Productions