Relevant Content

What is it?

This module provides two ways of referencing relevant content. Both of these methods provide configuration to filter for specific content types and vocabularies, limit the maximum size of the result and provide some header text. The result on both cases are a list of nodes which the module considers most relevant based on the categorization of the current page. This is achieved by finding other nodes which are of one of the allowed types and have the most number of terms in common. The two methods are:

Blocks

This module will provide as many customisable blocks as a site administrator wants. Each block has its own settings for node type, vocabulary, maximum result size and otional header text. Blocks can appear on any page which causes terms to be loaded into Relevant Content. Usually this is any page which views a node (a node page or a view such as a taxonomy term list). Usually you only want a block to appear on a node page, however you may find situation where you want to place a block on a non-node page.

CCK (new)

The new CCK Field Type (available in both 1.3 releases for Drupal 5 & 6). This is a read-only field (much like Node Referrer) which allows the administrator to embed a field that is "display only" (ie, nothing appears on individual node edit forms). This field is configured in the same way the blocks are configured; node type & vocabulary filtering, maximum result size limit and header text. The advantage of the CCK method is the result set is more "embedded" within the content.

Example

Say you have a blog node which is tagged with terms A, B, C & D and you enabled this module to provide a block of relevant nodes. When you visit this blog node this module will go off and do a lookup on all other blog nodes and filter out so it produces a list of nodes which are one of the selected types for that block and also tagged with any of A, B, C or D (our current viewing nodes terms). It then groups this list on the node ID and counts how many terms each node has. This effectively is finding how many terms each other node has in common with the current node. If there is more than 1 node with the same term count then it falls back to the created time-stamp, placing the most recent ones at the top. There is also an option to exclude nodes from the listing. This is useful if you are on a node page as it means the module will automatically exclude the currently viewed node from the list (it would probably rank as the most relevant node otherwise due to the number of matching terms).

Also, the the new CCK field type, you could add a field which appears below the body (but will appear above the comments) so once a user has finished reading they will see a list of content which you can recommend. Alternatively, with a little CSS magic in your theme, you could float the CCK Field to the side, add a little padding, border & margin an have a related content section with the content flowing around it. You could even use the CCK field to find image nodes which are related by taxonomy terms.

Similar Modules

After promising a comparison of "related content" style modules - someone else (Robert Middleswarth) has been brilliant and done it for me! Checkout the in-progress comparison here.

DEV WORK!

Both the D6 and D7 branches are currently unstable while I do some major rewriting of the module. Please bear with me!