Drupal modules

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'.

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.  

Chase Paymentech Module for Ubercart

Submitted by jesse on

Announcing the uc_chasepaymentech module for Ubercart!

This is a module that adds Chase Paymentech hosted checkout as a payment method to Ubercart. There isn't currently a module that integrates Ubercart with Chase paymentech. Although Chase based their hosted checkout on Authorize.net's framework, their specific implementation and methods of response verification are slightly different in functionality. There is not a sensible way to go about modifying the Authorize.net module that ships with Ubercart to incorporate Chase Paymentech without rewriting the entire Authorize.net module to make it more generic and adaptable to other Payment Companies and their implementations of the authorize.net framework. However, this may be an option for the future.

tinyMCE: Adding css styles to menu style pull-down

Submitted by jesse on

As designers, something that we all wish at one point or another is for non-technical users to be able to style their contributed content according to the styles we have defined in style sheets. Users usually want to be able to easily do this as well. If a WYSIWYG is involved it often means a user will be selecting colours and fonts that will end up inline with the element; hard coded in the HTML like <div style="{background-color='green'; font-size='2em';}" >. It can also be time consuming to have to go and style everything a user inputs if it doesn't exactly fit your design model.

For tinyMCE, there is a nice feature that allows you to add styles to a 'style' pull-down menu. Here is how you can go about setting that up:

1. Add and enable the Wysiwyg module

2. Go to Site Configuration >> Wysiwyg

3. click 'edit' beside Full HTML -- TinyMCE

4. click 'buttons and plugins' to open the buttons settings. In here you will want to check 'font style', 'remove format', 'HTML block format'

5. click 'CSS' to open the css settings. Here there are several fields:

  • Block Formats: are the tags a user can enclose their content in. It appears in the editors 'Format' pull-down. These are up to you.
  • Editor CSS: Selects where the 'Styles' pull-down inherits its options from. By default it is set to 'Use Theme CSS' which means the admin theme's CSS. Set this to 'Define CSS' so it will inherit from the CSS of your choice.
  • CSS Path: The path(s) to the CSS file(s) you want the CSS classes to be pulled from. I find the full path works best. See Style sheet instructions below for further details.
  • CSS Classes: Optionally you can use this to filter the styles that you want to appear in the pull-down list. If left blank it all styles will appear in the pull-down.

Introducing the Connect Module

Submitted by stevem on

OK, so the Connect module has actually been around for a while now, but the first version was painfully difficult to use, and the second version has only just seen an official, albeit beta, release.

Connect arose because we wanted to create a flexible and extensible online campaign platform for Drupal. The goal was to produce a framework that would allow different features to be added as necessary. Thus, a single tool could be used to create a simple petition or a sophisticated online email- or fax-sending campaign.

Earth Hour Drupal Module - Learning to Turn Off

This has been slightly revised to reflect the status of this project for 2011.

Tell all your visitors you support the efforts of Earth Hour. It's a simple measure for the environment.

With the Earth Hour module for Drupal you can easily show your support and have your site automatically "shut off" for the hour, no matter where in the world you are.

The plugin counts down to earth hour, counts how many other sites are using this plugin, and share the link to earthhour.org with your visitors.

I was inspired to create this module by @haggaret who asked on Twitter for a Drupal version of the plugin for @bravenewcode's Earth Hour WordPress Plugin. It looked pretty simple to construct and I had never done a Word Press to Drupal port, so I decided to take it on.  

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