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[request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
This plugin would attempt to automatically populate link descriptions using the target link’s descrption meta tag:
Something like this:
For each link an empty description
Add link ID to list
For each list item ID
Read URL
Get description meta tag content from URL (example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3711357/get-title-and-meta-tags-of-external-site)
(Clean) insert description into TXP databaseThe end…?
Last edited by maruchan (2012-06-01 03:02:44)
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#2 2012-06-01 05:08:23
- tom1
- Member
- Registered: 2009-03-20
- Posts: 36
Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
I’d like the idea of doing it live when page is loaded, so descriptions would be always up to date. Too bad it might be a performance issue, if you show many links on one pageload.
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Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
Not only it causes performance issues, it would abuse the sites you would be linking. Doing constant live request to linked remote sites cause unwanted traffic to those others, which they do not want. The right thing would be to fetch the description once and cache it. Otherwise you are — well, you are an asshole to put it the nice way.
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Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
Anyways, as far doing such plugin, technically it shouldn’t require more than hooking to link, link_save and link, link_post callback events. Then checking for POST description’s contents and if it’s empty, fetching the POST url with cURL. If the page is received successfully, the description can be picked from the markup using either DOM extension (xPath or plain), regular expression (not ideal for complex markup) or some other 3rd party node/HTML parser.
Along the lines of this, small totally untested example:
/**
* Registers the function to Link editor's saving events
*/
register_callback('abc_link_description', 'link', 'link_save', 1);
register_callback('abc_link_description', 'link', 'link_post', 1);
/**
* Fetches and modifies description
*/
function abc_link_description() {
extract(psa(array(
'url',
'description',
)));
/*
Checks that CSRF token is valid, that fetching is needed and that required
DOM extension and cURL are available
*/
if(ps('_txp_token') != form_token() || $description !== '' || !$url || !class_exists('DOMDocument') || !function_exists('curl_init')) {
return;
}
/*
Fetches the page contents using cURL
*/
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$r = curl_exec($ch);
$http = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
/*
Checks that page is there and HTTP status says OK.
*/
if(!$r || $http != 200) {
return;
}
/*
Parses description from the document using DOM extension
*/
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($r);
$meta = $dom->getElementsByTagName('meta');
foreach($meta as $m) {
if($m->getAttribute('name') == 'description') {
$desc = $m->getAttribute('content');
}
}
/*
Replaces HTTP POST description
*/
if(!empty($desc)) {
$_POST['description'] = $desc;
}
}Last edited by Gocom (2012-06-01 06:13:45)
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Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
Nice one, Jukka. I tried your code, but I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe it’s my plugin packaging. I used ied_plugin_composer. I’m not seeing anything in the error logs.
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Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
Understood! I will make it work. Thanks for the ingredients.
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Re: [request] Auto-populate Link Descriptions
On public side, you can retrieve descriptions with etc_query, like this:
<txp:etc_query url="http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=38115" query="//head/meta[@property='og:description']/@content">
{$htmlspecialchars({?})}
</txp:etc_query>Currently etc_query does not go on the admin side, but it suffices to change its type.
Edit: added htmlspecialchars, just in case. Alternatively,
<txp:etc_query url="http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=38115" functions="htmlspecialchars" query="htmlspecialchars(string(//head/meta[@property='og:description']/@content))" />gives the same result.
Last edited by etc (2012-08-20 14:53:49)
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