Notes on ia module

The ia module is a custom Drupal module that is used to interact with the Internet Archive. it provides methods that allow contributing (uploading/publishing) to archive.org and for retrieving media metadata from archive postings in the Ourmedia collection.

I am working on this module in order to track down various bugs related to media links not showing up correctly due to incomplete or missing information relating our nodes to archive posts.

Here are some notes and issues:

• There are a number of obsolete and non-functioning archive web services specified in this module. In particular:
  • http://www.archive.org/details-db.php is referenced in _ia_details_url($type, $identifier), however this function does not appear to be called anywhere.
  • http://www.archive.org/services/item-status.php is used by ia_check_status($identifier). This is called by ia_admin(). This explains why the admin function appears to have stopped working. This is also called by ia_nodeapi() during 'load' when a node has no active ia record containing the identifier of the corresponding archive.org item.

• this module does some caching.
• relationships between node, files, ia and media% tables
• found a bug in how new file records were being saved without a valid node id - fixed
• looking into "missing media" messages
• I disabled archive account validation routines in ia_nodeapi and ia_user as per JD's request.
• found places where there are invalid assumptions about archive metadata files
• creating a method to allow correcting and resyncing Ourmedia and Archive records
• login allows creation of new user with mail as name ia_pass when

• consider redesign using cck social media module.
• allow manual setting of ia_identifier (we can not always map these by algorythm)?

• consider a SpinXpress module that allow remote authorization (ask eric to add all our servers to auth list). Add cck fields for SX username, pass and email? allow multiple SX accounts?

(image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/sninesix/274456715/)