Blog: CCK

Improving the Workflow and Usability of Multilingual Video Subtitles

Last week I posted about adding multilingual subtitles to video content using JW FLV Media Player and Drupal. The workflow I described involves attaching a W3C Timed-Text XML file to a node using an upload form. It’s great for initial translations because you can take advantage of a desktop captioning tool, but what happens when you need to make small changes or corrections? We decided that requiring the user to download the file, edit it, and re-upload it was a major usability issue.

My solution is to parse the contents of the Timed-Text file into a CCK field so it can be manipulated directly on the node editing form. The uploaded file is parsed and the CCK field is populated right before your eyes using an AJAX callback, and the interface allows users to add additional lines of captions dynamically thanks to some logic borrowed from the Link module. Once the node is saved, the CCK field can be used with a custom views style plugin to display a fully formatted Timed-Text XML file.

You can watch what I did in this screencast:

Use the Feed Element Mapper to Map Any RSS Tag to Taxonomy or CCK Fields

The first time I talked here about the Feed Element Mapper, it was still quite basic - it just mapped feed elements recognized by FeedAPI to taxonomy terms. That was already pretty cool, but what about mapping to CCK fields, and what about mapping any tag - even custom ones - to CCK fields? 

Well, the latest developer version of FeedAPI (Jan 23rd), together with Feed Element Mapper 1.0 beta 3, can do this. It offers a straight forward form manageable also for the not so experienced site builder. I recorded this screencast to show you how this plays out on the UI:

If you would like to try this, take care that you do the following:

• Use FeedAPI 1.0
• Use Feed Element Mapper >= 1.0 beta 3
• Configure your feeds to use parser_simplepie as parser.