I would like to have a "Facebook style link commment" feature in Drupal 7. When you enter a URL it will pull the page title, first 100 characters of the main website text and an image. There is a module called "Facebook Style Micropublisher" but it's Drupal 6 only. Any other ideas on how this could get accomplished?
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Will you be entering the url in a new node? – Matthew Hui Jun 6 '11 at 5:14
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I would enter the URL and the parsed info into fields. Over the weekend I stumbled across oembed.com (an open format to embed content) and embed.ly (a commercial site). There is even a module that seems to support both: drupal.org/project/oembed. – uwe Jun 7 '11 at 0:56
The manual way to do it is to create a custom module that uses drupal_http_request to download the remote URL, then parse through the resulting data to pull out any images, a summary, and the contents of the title tag.
This is a lot harder than it sounds because manually parsing HTML is actually pretty tricky. If you must take this approach, try using simplexml or a library that tries to simplify things for you.
A better approach might be just porting the Drupal 6 module yourself - it's probably less work and you could contribute your code back and possibly get patches from other contributors.
