A little over a year ago I blogged about moving to using a Drupal Planet tag to determine which posts about Drupal get posted on Drupal Planet. This is certainly better than having every Drupal related post appear in Drupal Planet. Why not send everything? Well there are a number of smaller posts that don't need to land in the hundreds of RSS inboxes around the globe but should still appear on my site.
However, the separate tag method has its drawbacks. For one thing it means my site now has, by default, two pages of Drupal posts. One contains all the posts and the other just those that went to Drupal Planet. Visitors to my site, however, don't need to see this distinction. In fact they are put off by it because it's a nonsensical differentiation for these visitors. Even somebody following a link from Drupal Planet is left with just a few posts and might not find some other smaller posts that could be helpful.
Given that the ability to post content and selectively send it to Drupal Planet is important and that I'd like to do so without hindering the usability of my website what's the solution. In true Drupal fashion there's a module for that. In this case it's the Flag module to be precise. Here's a quick look at this simple setup.
After installing and enabling the Flag module the next step is to create a Drupal Planet flag. Adding a flag starts with visiting Administration >> Site Building >> Flags >> Add (/admin/build/flags/add) on the site.
A couple of settings are key to making the Drupal Planet flag work well. First it should be a "Global" flag meaning that each node is either flagged or not and individual users can't set the flag differently on each node.
Sitting at O'Hare on the way home from the inaugural Drupal Camp Atlanta. It was a great camp on the whole. The waining days of summer brought plenty of rain to Atlanta. Rain in Atlanta is a rather different experience for a life-long westerner. I hold fast to an instinctive reaction to seeing rain outside. When exiting the building the rain means it will be somewhere between chili and downright cold outside. It doesn't rain that way in Atlanta. Rather the opposite every building we exited the outdoors, rain included, was warmer. Never before have I had my glasses fog up so much in September.
