Transclusion (Remote content)

A way of managing "Remote content" and displaying it in your Drupal site.

Some aspects may not work with all parts of Entity API yet - although it's tagged as stable, that just means "Has been working OK in production for me for 2 years" but has not been battle-tested against different expectations.

We've often created "Remote teasers" on our sites, where the content managers want to present external content in a similar way to their normal pages, for instance when a large company provides subsites or remote services on external URLs. Currently we patch this together with link and cck redirect.

Extending this, I also want to be able to pull back content from remote sites, as quotations, excerpts, references or sometimes full pages. But although we have a local copy, the *content* is sourced from elsewhere. And I want to *maintain* that link, not just copy & paste. And, potentially, refresh periodically.

Some initiatives in this area also include :

oEmbed (seen in the tweet embed feature around the web)
oembed.module

Google Gadgets (those those embeds are usually primarily functional)

oembed_entity.module
embed_widgets.module
opengraph_filter.module that can turn offsite links into inline summaries.
Include_field.module that inlines content (potentially remote) into your nodes in realtime. No caching AFAIK. See also proxy.module for that.

Unlike a 2001 module, this vision of transclusion extends to include remote content, pulled from any URL in many ways, not simply re-embedding an existing node from the same site.

Unlike the API-based tools like oembed that accepts what the remote site gives you, this is more of a "scraper", and is aligned with the goals of the original hypertext Fine-Grained Transclusion in the Hypertext Markup Language (1997)

/**
* @file
* Include remotely-sourced content into Drupal pages.
*
* This will work in a number of ways, each with different uses.
* - As an input filter, a link or a citation referring to other online
* content can bring in a formatted snippet of the referred document
* - As a field, remote links (like link field) can display what they link to.
* - As an entity, remote content becomes a sourced chunk of locally-copied
* data that can be aggregated and re-used on the site.
*
* Each of these instances can be configured to cache the fetched content,
* for efficiency and to prevent linkrot, but may also be configured to refresh
* from the original as needed (regularly or per-request).
* This would make it equally useful for pulling in content that is expected
* to change remotely (like a weather report)
*
* The selector for remote content is simply URL-like, and can refer to
* #anchors within remote documents to target the snippet to pull.
* Great for citations, links to comments or quotes in context.
* You can even pull all of the [body] or #content of a remote article.
* More complex scraper patterns can be derived with xpath to target parts
* of a remote DOM.
* A simpler selector is an opengraph (OG) summary of remote content, producing
* the snippets as seen in Facebook links.
*
* If linking to a remote media item (like an image) proper rendering could be
* done, though yu may want to look into media.module and its remote sources
* for that.
*
*/