development

The "CLUMPS" module

Submitted by jesse on

Clumps is a module that I have just written and will eventually be releasing. Its currently about 90% finished. The name was hastily chosen from a google search for a synonym to section. It is also still up for debate so feel free to comment if you can think of a good name.

All relatively good ideas start with a relatively complex, or annoying, problem.

Protagonist:

A site was required that split off into two separate sides with different paths say /sideone and /sidetwo. Most content is to be different, but some should be shared including menus and menu items. Doesn't sound like a very complicated problem does it? The content that is different will obviously be easy in that you can set the url aliases to /sideone/page1, /sidetwo/page2, etc.

Problem:

The complicated part comes when you consider how to maintain that context separation of which side you are on for the shared content. In this case the shared content had to be prefixed with the /sideone or /sidetwo. Regardless, there are a couple tricky problems here:

  1. how do you know which side of the site you were working on once you've gone to one of the shared pages?
  2. For that matter how do you have a menu display only the relevant items for a particular side as well as the shared items?
  3. How do you have the shared menu item knowledgeable about the context of which side of the site you are on?

Managing the Drupal Permissions Morass

Submitted by ethan on

Recently, a project I was working on required access control on individual nodes. We used the module Node Privacy by Role which allows for view, edit and delete permissions to be set per node, per role. While this process is time consuming, it allows there to be levels of content that can easily be edited by administrators. Since Drupal has been moving toward user-defined content types, rather than types specified explicitly by modules, there are few options for adjusting permissions by the standard way (Access Control for Drupal 5, Permissions for Drupal 6).

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