Kiva API / Drupal Test Site

I committed some nice changes last night to the Kiva module.

Users (who have the proper permission) can now associate a kiva account with their (drupal) user account. A list of kiva loans for that account will then show up in his/her user page (i.e., http://example.com/user/).

More to follow soon!

Wow! It's been an arduous few weeks -- trying to suck up data from Kiva's (deprecated) RSS feeds, then map it to CCK fields (using the incredible feedapi_mapper and the equally distinguished feedapi_parser_exhaustive), and then map those nodes to an actual map using the (also awesome) nicemap. (Can I buy stock in Development Seed?)

I came close a few times, but couldn't get the thing to work with any kind of consistency.

Enter quickcel. Again. In a flash, he's written a proof-of-concept extension for feedapi that translates kiva's json perfectly. A few small additions to his code and I'm mapping longitude and latitude to CCK fields.

And the nicemap? No problem at all. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but this is a huge step forward. Needless to say, this parser will be packaged into the kiva module (along with some other goodies).

Once again, huge thanks to quickcel!

In addition to the kiva module, I'm experimenting with other ways to consume Kiva info.

For example, I'm having the site suck up the (soon to be deprecated?) RSS business feed. Using the amazing FeedAPI, I'm turning the loans into nodes, then creating a rotating view (on the left-hand side) via Views Slideshow. Pretty cool.

I have the first version of the kiva module up and running. Check out the blocks on the right-hand side.

So far, so good.

Huge kudos to quickcel for getting this all started with version 1. Look for an official release soon -- over at the kiva project page.