Drupal automatic glossary for specific terms

Question

Greetings all helpers!

I have been reading and testing Drupal features recently and I find this CMS very scalable and interesting. I began working with themes, views, content types and ect... but I am looking for something I cannot find on the internet.

Context : I am creating a new website for one non-profit organization of mine for the 10th anniversary. Mainly, this site is for a game that has different abilities within it's rules. I would like to create a glossary for the different abilities. That is not a great challenge.

This is what I want to archive : With this glossary, I would like to like to the ability description each time it is encountered in a content.

Ability glossary (list) : http://conflitseternels.net/index.php?id=habiletes

Each time one ability is encountered in the content, it links to it's description.

If you can guide me through the accomplishment of this ask, I would be greatly happy !

Thank you, Will

Answer 1

I have found one module that seems to do something like that: Glossify (http://drupal.org/project/glossify). I have never used it myself, but it's worth a try. If Glossify doesn't work for you, consider helping to improve the module, or write a custom module yourself.

Theoretically, there are two methods to convert the words to links: when the node is saved or when the node is displayed. In both cases, you will be checking every word in a node and see if it matches one of the abilities. Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages. When choosing a solution, you have to keep an eye on performance because search-and-replace actions can take a lot of system resources, especially if you have many users, long texts and lots of abilities.

Altering content when a node is saved can be done in Drupal by implementing hook_nodeapi ($op=presave). Just before the content is written to the database, your nodeapi function does its magic. Advantage: the search-and-replace is performed only once for each node. Disadvantage: no new links will be added in existing nodes when you add a new ability (unless you re-save the node).

Altering content when a node is viewed can be done by implementing hook_nodeapi ($op=view) or hook_filter. The links will not saved in the database, but added on-the-fly every time a user views a node. Advantage: new abilities will also be linked in node saved earlier. Disadvantage: performance, the search-and-replace has to run on every node view (although caching would probably solve this partially).