Community

Views integration with the relation module

Submitted by jesse on

​Introduction

Relations is an awesome new module for Drupal 7. It essentially allows you to link any entities together and which are themselves fieldable. I can think of limitless ways in which this can be super useful. However, the topic of this blog posting is not to heap praise on relations and explain in detail what they can be used for; I'll let you discover that yourselves. The intention is rather to give a practical example of how to create views of separate entity types tied together with relations. Something that I've had to play around with for hours to figure out. Perhaps this will save you some time.

Note: ​At the time of writing this the functionality I'm discussing only exists in the dev release of relation. Beta3 does contain this. If people from the future are reading this blog the functionality was commited Jan 21st by chx.

​An Example relation

Just read about this example on the d.o. issue queue where someone needed help with the views integration. So, lets say we create a relation that defines a relationship between a user and nodes called 'follow'. So that is to say a user can select particular nodes they deem interesting and choose to follow them.

Note: ​This could be accomplished other ways as well such as using the flags module, but we'll ignore that for now and consider that a relation can probably give us more functionality. 

We add a field to the 'follow' relation called 'category' to categorize the nodes which the user is following.

So now what we have is a directional relation user -> node ​with the single field 'category'.

What's More Canadian Than Cree?

Submitted by mgifford on

I was pointed to this great resource on Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) links but it still doesn't have much information about presenting this language on the web.

Since hearing the story about the creation of Cree & Inuit syllabics, I've been interested in how colonization introduced written language to an oral culture. Since working on several Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi sites over the years, I've been curious as to how this applies to the web.  Being a unilingual person, I can't do more than look at the characters in any of these languages and I certainly have no education in linguistics.  However, I find the challenge of implementing aboriginal languages on the Internet to be quite a fascinating one. 

Cree is the most widely spoken native language in Canada and it's a people that span much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Northwest Territories. However, I was surprised to see how little content I could find on the Web that was written in Cree.  Much of what was available was presented either as images or through Flash, neither of which can be copied, easily searched and certainly would be inaccessible to assistive technologies. The lack of examples to learn from certainly made this exploration more difficult. 

Welcome, Bienvenue, Willkommen, Bienvenido, Benvenuto, 欢迎, с приездом, and Grüezi!

Submitted by erin on

Montreal i18n Coding Sprint

As DrupalCamp Montreal quickly comes upon us, there is a small band of people gathered in this lovely city for the Druapl 8 Multilingual Initiative Coding Sprint (#i18n_mtl), hosted by Gabor Hojtsy. We started our sprint at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, September 14, and will be continuing it until DrupalCamp starts on the 16th.

The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7

Submitted by openconcept on

Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 BookOpenConcept has been donating books to the Ottawa Public Library for a couple years now, and so last fall I ordered a bunch of Drupal 7 books anticipating that we'd review them within our team & then order new ones to the library had a fresh copy. I ordered my copy of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 (DGD7) back in 2010 along with several others. Well, Drupal 7 took a while to get finalized and so many of the books which were started then didn't actually get finished until after Drupal core had been finalized in January.

It was just after Dries keynote at the Chicago DrupalCon that Benjamin Melançon approached me at the last moment to try to get an accessibility appendix added to the the book. With all of the accessibility enhancements that had gone into Drupal 7 & the emphasis that Dries gave it for the Drupal 8 process, it was clear that this needed to be covered in the book. It's been a long process working on Drupal core and I've had the pleasure to work with Bojhan Somers, Jacine Luisi, Károly Négyesi, Nathaniel Catchpole and Roy Scholten. I've met with other contributors at DrupalCons and DrupalCamps I have attended -- this is definitely a book which is very representative of this broad community. {C}

Gitting Earth Hour & Drupal

Submitted by mgifford on

We've used CVS, SVN over the years and are now using Git. If you've not a programmer you probably wouldn't be familiar with tools like Concurrent Versions System or Subversion which allow for precise sharing & collaboration between thousands of people but with over 150,000 lines of code in Drupal Core, you really need to have a way to manage these details to ensure that you've got the highest quality control possible.  Git is the latest in social coding and because if it's distributed framework it should allow many more people to evaluate, experiment & collaborate with the Drupal community.  

Git & Drupal

Knowing that Drupal was adopting Git, we made the move to adopt it, replacing many of our other repositories.  There is quite a learning curve to get it set up and integrated with our processes, but it's been very impressive thus far.  Our ability to quickly integrate around a standard tool set that allows us to both track & centralize changes for our projects is already beginning to pay off.  Configuration files, default error messages, custom modules, client themes, not to mention Drupal core and community contributed themes/modules.  

SEO Fluff, Marketing & Other Nonsense

Submitted by mgifford on

I'm the first to admit that search engine optimization is important. I know that there is a lot to be learned about how to drive people to your site and ensure that they keep coming back to it. Two years ago it was estimated that there were 63 billion pages indexed by search engines. How will your site show up in the first pages of Google results if you don't get an edge over everyone else?

I know that there really are 'SEO Experts' out there, that know the web well and have seriously researched search engine behavior. But there are an equal number of people who have taken a course or two, bought some software to help them and whose real strength is selling their service.

A lot of 'SEO Experts' like to put content in static HTML pages in which they have complete control. Unfortunately, this makes the content harder for anyone in the organization to update and also makes it impossible for tools like Path Track to be able to monitor folks through your site. We recommend leveraging Drupal rather than building a hybrid site.

Accessibility Critique of the 2010 Open Source CMS Report!

Submitted by mgifford on

Earlier this year we agreed to sponsor the IdealWare's 2010 report comparing popular open source content management systems, and we're glad to have done so! It is so important to have a review of different systems if only to encourage discussion & debate about software use in the non-profit sector.

Why Drupal 7 is Great

Earlier this week I bosted on the NOSI discussion list about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements. I know how much more accessible it was than Drupal 6. I have also done some work to compare it with other popular CMS systems.  We've developed a frank accessibility statement, that outlines not just what the software does, but how we will work for a more inclusive community. There is an active accessibility community both online & in conference BoF (birds of a feather) sessions. 

We've addressed a great many accessibility challenges and done so in a way that is public so that other communities can draw on our experience. There are also people who are contributing leading edge approaches to managing accessibility. An organization looking to build an accessible site now should really be looking at adopting as much HTML5 as possible. Drupal 7 core is presently built on xHTML, but there are more accessible themes which allow more use of the still draft HTML5 & WAI-ARIA.

Running a 15 Month Marathon of Government Accessibility

Submitted by mgifford on

Donna Jodhan has won a landmark case to fix accessibility problems for the blind within Government of Canada websites.  This judgement has some problems with it, not the least of which is how to make 247 million plus web pages accessible.  The judgment was delivered out on November 29th, 2010 and so the government is now tasked to upgrade the accessibility of these pages in March of 2012.  That is 19 business days away from today, which would mean 13000000 pages per day would have to be evaluated for use with a screen-reader and enhanced in order to fulfill the judge's ruling. 

Clearly even if there was a budget to implement this, there aren't the people with the skills & the infrastructure in place to properly evaluate this volume of work within the federal government. 

As daunting as this task looks, there are a great many ways to make this challenge more manageable. 

Preparing a Drupal Presentation with HTML5 & CSS3

Submitted by mgifford on

A slide from the presentationIn preparing for my live streamed HD session at Drupal Camp Montreal 2010, I was prompted by someone's tweet or blogpost from DrupalCon Copenhagen to try a different approach with this presentation. I'd much rather be facilitating than presenting, but I do have a message I want to spread to the community, so I had to take this seriously.

Now the quality of the notes from DrupalCon's are definitely getting getting better. Here's examples from San Francisco & Copenhagen (links removed). There's stuff here that should be borrowed by many other conferences.

A few folks I respect have also written a few calls for better presentations. Gregory Heller's post We've Met The Enemy And He Is Powerpoint is great. Emma Jane Hogbin's Presenting: Make It Short and Make It Memorable at DrupalCon DC (links removed) is good. She's written some great books for the community too.

{C}

Why Bother with Web Accessibility?

Submitted by mgifford on

I'm happy to announce that the video of my presentation is now online. Thanks DBNStudios for recording it. I'd also like to thank @cobalt123, @Chris Devers, @Let Ideas Compete, @OlsenWeb, @crizzirc, @mcbeth, @liber, @leshoward, @willem velthoven, @nickhall, @Stefan, @cobalt123, @Kalense Kid, @Kalense Kid, @PhillipC, @United Nations Photo, @ChrisGoldNY, @Norma Desmond, @Sara G..., @Dan Kunitz, @Gabor Hojtsy, @Christolakis, @Don Solo, @cobalt123, @Rene Ehrhardt, @patrick h. lauke, @m.gifford, @, @NJLA: New Jersey Library Association licensing their images under a creative commons license so that I could use them in this presentation. Sadly, I was not organized enough to have them incorporated in the video presentation unfortunately.

Photo from DrupalCon Montreal's Closing Plenary This weekend I presented a session at Drupal Camp Montreal 2010 on Drupal 7 & Accessibility. I always get nervous around presentations, but this is an important issue in which I have invested a lot of time & effort in the last two years. I've blogged about the HTML5 slide presentation, but it's also interesting.

I had a few goals in doing this presentation and I'm not sure how well I did in covering them. I certainly did raise the issue of Accessibility in the Drupal community. Many people were aware that there are some accessibility enhancements in D7, but there were a few who were not familiar with the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or the WCAG 2.0 P.O.U.R. objectives.

Guidelines like WCAG are an indispensable part of improving accessibility, but they aren't the only means tool at our disposal and shouldn't be used in isolation. They are guidelines which can be used in conjunction with user feedback & expert advice.

Pages

Subscribe to Community