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By FatPitchFinancials on
I manage an investment blog that is currently using WordPress. However, I am starting to get frustrated with the limitations of WordPress. I wanted to learn whether Drupal might help me enhance my site and handle some of the tasks that I can't currently do in WordPress.
A few months ago I created a "premium" content section on my site for paying members. I use Registered Only plugin in WordPress right now to restrict access. It looks like Drupal has a built in system for this feature. Is this true? Is there anything that can help me keep track of when users' subscriptions are expiring?
The main feature of the premium content section of my site is a listing of stock risk arbitrage opportunities for small individual investors. I'm currently entering in the stock symbol, company name, tender price and links to the SEC filings in to an Excel spreadsheet that then gets the stock price for each stock in the table and then calculates the difference between the stock price and the price the company is offering to buy back the stock for. I then run a mail merge and produce the list of the deals with xhtml markup. I have to run this several times to get reports sorted by each of the different variables. This is a real annoying task.
I noticed the Flexinode module, and it looks like I could set up a node that would have fields I could configure and enter the information for each of these deals into a form. I also spotted the stockapi module that can get stock prices from Yahoo. I was wondering if there was any way I could have a field in a flexinode for stock ticker and then have the stock price automatically added to another field. I also need another field that takes the stock price and calculates the percent gain from the offering price of the stock buy back (entered earlier into a numeric field).
If I could do this and then provide a table of this information that is sortable, I would switch over to Drupal ASAP. Is this currently possible without any programing? Or if it does require a module, would it be easy enough that someone here could whip up something quickly that would allow stock quotes from the stockapi in a flexinode and produce a field that is based on a calculation between the stock quote and a numeric field?
Comments
It can be done, but will take programming
What you propose can be done, but will take some programming.
Flexinode doesn't have the ability to capture the information from another module. Once the information is entered into a flexinode the listing by different parameters.
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Actually it could be done without programming....
It's simple enough I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before.... You'd still need to use your Excel sheet to capture the data, including the stock quote. You'll also have to create a flexinode with the right fields you want displayed for each stock.
Then you'd setup the Node Import (http://drupal.org/project/node_import) module to create pages from your CSV output from Excel. It will take a little tweaking and experimentation but should work well. You could go so far as to create a theme that displays your Flexinode in a special way that could include having a link to Yahoo! finance or other location to get a current quote.
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Everything but...
The last 2 paragraphs. As the above post said Flexinode cannot access other modules. However every thing else you asked could easily be done.
Thanks
Thank you for the prompt responses. I'm a bit bumbed that flexinode can't take parameters from another module or database table. The node import module could do the trick for now.
I guess I'd have to make a module that could do the type of module that I want if I want updated stock quotes. How hard is it to create a module for a custom node that could do a calculation of two fields and report the result?
Hard is relative
My answer would be that it's not too hard at all. But I'm pretty comfortable with PHP - not a super expert, but comfortable and comfortable looking up what I don't know. There's a good start in the Drupal Handbooks that talks about customizing the Story module to be a Press Release module. That would be the basic model and then customize the extra fields etc. from there.
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