Contrib.social

Documentation update - changes provided with a new logo

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 9 March 2024, 10 months ago
Updated 29 May 2024, 7 months ago

The module page and its documentation needs some update. Some piece of information are outdated and incorrect.

Furthermore, as I believe in this module and its ecosystem, I propose a new logo for the branding: a kind of Drupal octopus as External Entities is a way to grab data from everywhere, like an octopus can grab many things with its eight arms. I am the author of this logo which could be derived for external entities plugins as well. I can provide the source SVG on demand. I put it under the GNU General Public License v2 (as distributed with Drupal modules) and the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 (as used for documentation).

Regarding the documentation, I wrote a couple of tutorials that are "waiting for the module owner approval" to be added to the official external entities documentation. I think it may just need a couple of click somewhere to have that documentation officially added. But I admit I don't know exactly how it works... Here are the corresponding guides:

Regarding the current documentation:

  • Mapping fields → : there is now another way than Imagecache External to display external images. The dev version of xnttfiles → does the trick and enables the mapping of File and Image fields to external entity URIs. I'll release a new beta soon with this feature. Once its done, I'll update that documentation myself. (just to notify)
  • Annotations → : it's a pain to create an annotation entity and attach it for each external entity "instance". I think I should mention there that there is the External Entity manager that can generate all the annotation entities automatically.
  • Views → : this page is incorrect as there is the xnttviews → plugin that enables the use of external entities with Drupal Views. However, while xnttviews enables the use of any external entities inside views when those are "local" (databases, files or local REST service), it is still pertinent to use Search API to index remote data gathered from (distant) REST services. I will update the doc accordingly unless other advice.

And regarding the module's page:

  • "Drupal 8" should be turned into "Drupal 8+"
  • The list of plugins should be turned into a link to this page: External Entities Plugins → (so it could be updated by contributors)
  • Remove the sentence "Currently the module is using a REST back-end (more back-end types can be added since they are just plugins)." as there are many plugins other than REST by now. Also "per endpoint" may not be accurate as well since xnttmulti → enable mixing sources.
  • The "Views:" paragraph can be replaced as there is the xnttviews → module: Views: External Entities module is not supported by the Views module natively however you can use the External Entities Views module to enable that support or use Search API to index external entities data and create a view on it when working with remote data. (or something similar... I'm note a native English speaker, please adjust the text)
  • "Drupal and this module assumes all fields of an entity are coming from the same dataset." which is not true if you consider the xnttmulti → module: this module can assume entities can be hybrids of multiple sources (REST, database, files, all mixed in any combination to produce an hybrid data source)
  • It might be also pertinent to mention in the last part dealing with annotations, that the External Entity Manager → plugin can be used to auto-generate annotation entities as well as auto-generate complete local copies of external entities as regular Drupal content (node) entities that can hold more fields and can be automatically synchronized on a regular time basis through crons.

So, I don't see much limitations to the External Entities module now... :-) Except maybe a first real release! ;-D
(...and better documented and stable plugins ;-p)

📌 Task
Status

Fixed

Version

2.0

Component

Documentation

Created by

🇫🇷France guignonv

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