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Fusion Drupal Themes: Ultimate list of Drupal grid theme resources
Grid-based web development has evolved over the past few years from being the stuff of a few fringe enthusiasts to a fundamental concept for designing and building web sites. While grids aren’t the answer to everything, there are a number of ways they make your life a lot easier.
If you’re interested in building or using a grid Drupal theme, here is a big collection of resources in one place to get you started!
Domain Administration Helper
This module enables site administrators using the Domain Access module to delegate administration tasks for individual sub-domains to users in a given role, without requiring sitewide permissions. The module comes with a block which groups common administration tasks for a domain in one place.
Module developed by Vasudeva Server, and first deployed on the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team website.
There is a module for that!: Actions REST, a poor man's URI interface to actions
I rely on actions extensively to build functionality in my sites. I find them convenient for business logic because they are packaged chunks of functionality that can be called from many places, including Trigger, Rules, and VBO. Today, I've added a new place where actions can be called: the URL. Actions REST provides this functionality.
Consider a job site where a supplier receives an invitation to participate in a project. The supplier logs on the site and views the invitation, then wants to accept or decline it.
Actions REST
Actions REST enables actions to be called on the URL, using a parameter encoding scheme that tries to minimize (bad) surprises. Here are some examples:
- http://example.com/node/1276/action/node_publish_action calls the 'node_publish_action' on node 1276 (and actually publishes it).
- http://example.com/node/1276/action/node_assign_owner_action/owner_name/infojunkie calls the 'node_assign_owner_action' on node 1276, passing it the parameter 'owner_name' with a value of 'infojunkie'.
- http://example.com/node/1276/action/node_assign_owner_action calls the 'node_assign_owner_action' on node 1276. When it finds that parameters are missing, it displays the action form to let the user interactively fill in the values before executing the action.
- http://example.com/user/361/action/user_block_user_action calls the 'user_block_user_action' on user 361.
- http://example.com/system/action/system_send_email_action/recipient/mom@yahoo.com/subject/Hello/message/Hi mom :-) sends an email to your mom.
Sponsored by AdHack. Thanks for your generous support.
CiviCRM Blog: Support Canvassing and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) functionality in CiviCRM
Political groups and campaigns have been some of the earliest users of CiviCRM. We've had quite a few political parties using CiviCRM: Green Party of New Zealand, Green Party of Canada, Oregon State Democrats, Vermont Progressive Party and even the Pirate Party of Germany! One of the features missing from CiviCRM has been Canvassing, GOTV, PhoneList and WalkList functionality. This has been long requested and they have been various specifications on the wiki for this.
Earlier this year we worked with Progressive Technology Project (PTP) on CiviEngage, a Drupal Module that brings in address parsing, walklist and phonelist support into CiviCRM. You can read more about this work here: Canvass and Phonebank.
At the same time Will Brownsberger, a state legislator from Massachusetts, started using CiviCRM to support his office and campaign operations. As part of his campaign he wrote a drupal/civicrm module to do voter canvassing. Will was kind enough to attend and demo his module at the CiviCRM Boston Developer Camp in February.
Pronovix: Real time activity and message stream on Open Atrium
Yesterday I saw this post with a video on the new P2 theme for Wordpress and how Advomatic is using that as a real time microblog like tool for status updates in their company. And it got me thinking...
For some time now we've been using Open Atrium in Pronovix for project management. But until today all of our real time communication takes place through Skype. At some point we tried to replace Skype with XMPP (because Skype didn't properly work on Linux) but once Skype worked again for all the colleagues Jabber got abandoned.
One of the reasons why we were interested in Jabber was to integrate activity updates into our communication tool (e.g. posting comment, case, commit messages). So that we would be able to have a discussion and have a bot post newly created cases into our chat channel.
Traces of the past: Computer algorithm able to 'read' memories
CommonPlaces e-Solutions: CommonPlaces’ Michelle Lauer to Present at DrupalCon SF
CommonPlaces is thrilled to announce that Michelle Lauer has been selected by the Drupal community to present “Views Examples: Using Arguments and Relationships” at DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held from April 19-21. You can read our press release here.
In her session, Michelle will share a repeatable strategy for using arguments and relationships with Drupal Views to display specific subsets of content. Here’s the session description, from the DrupalCon SF site:
Views are a powerful way to display specific subsets of your content. From a simple list of all nodes in a single content type to a complex collection of related information, each step will be explained so you can easily repeat the strategy in your own views.
I will demonstrate a systematic approach to building all views and show examples of using arguments and relationships.
Topics
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 80: Yves Chedemois on the History and Future of CCK
Yves Chedemois (aka "yched") talks about how he became the co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) along with KarenS. He also talks about the early days of CCK, and the co-evolution along with the Views. Yched also talks a bit about his motivation for continuing to work on a project such as CCK, and the challenges of working on it. He also talks about which parts of CCK are included in Drupal 7 as a part of fields in core, the new field storage engine in D7, and which parts of CCK are not included as well as pending tasks such as the challenges of developing the upgrade path to D7.
Views Arguments Extras
This module contains a group of view handers and plugins that add the following options.
Argument Default Current Node CCKallows for cck field values of the current node to be loaded as default arguments
Argument Order Sorta sort handler, that allows for the order of items to be based on there order in a multi-value argument
Business of Gaming Retail: Pre-Opening Sales Projection
Views PSPP
The Views PSPP module allows a view to be displayed/exported in PSPP format. The module was heavily inspired by the Views Bonus Pack Export module. The module simply adds these two new styles to the Feed display:
- PSPP Syntax used to describe the PSPP syntax.
- PSPP CSV used to describe export data.
PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a Free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions. PSPP is a free Software licensed under GPLv3 or later.
Dependencies Usage- Install and enable the module
- Edit or add a view
- Add a new Feed Display
- Change its style to PSPP CSV
Adaptivethemes: Field Type Suggestions in Drupal 7
Today I finally got around to testing out the new field suggestions in Drupal 7. If you’re not familiar with the standard suggestions in short you can either use field templates or override theme_field using a naming convention not unlike we do with preprocess functions. What struck me as kind of odd was the lack suggestions for field types—maybe there’s a very good reason for this such as performance, I don’t know, but I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use them, if I wanted to.
Options Element
Options Element is a module that provides a better mechanism to specify select list, checkbox, and radio button options. Rather than requiring the user to use strange syntax like "key|value" in a textarea, Options Element provides a clean interface for specifying options. Developers may use $element['#type'] = 'options' in their own modules. If JavaScript is disabled, any 'options_element' will degrade to the standard textarea for specifying options.
Load Test Plan
Load Test Plan is a module which allows modules to create test plans for load testing your Drupal site. It can export to modules which will create code for JMeter, Grinder, and others.
Fusion Drupal Themes: New faces at TNT
In all our recent excitement, I have neglected to introduce the two newest members of the TopNotchThemes family!
Stacy WrayStacy joined us a few months ago to provide some much needed assistance with themer-herding, customer support, bookkeeping, and generally supporting our team. She’s the friendly face you’ll talk to first if you have any questions about our themes. Stacy is also involved with the rebirth of the Drupal Dojo/Kata, and has been upping her Drupal nerd cred on a daily basis.
Sheena Donnelly
Field converter
An API for non-CCK modules to use to convert their custom data to FieldAPI fields.
Modules should define a conversion plan that define:
- new FieldAPI fields to create or existing ones to use
- how the data on their object (one of node, user, term, comment, etc) should be manipulated
The user then selects conversion plans to run in the admin UI, and the entire conversion is performed in a batch operation.
WARNING: this is still largely proof of concept code, initially thrashed out on this issue: #366364: Data migration from D6 contrib CCK fields to D7 Field API. It really needs some proper testing with real data. If you are a maintainer of a module that wishes to migrate to FieldAPI for Drupal 7, please get in touch!
Dave Cohen: Drupal for Facebook at SF DUG
I had the opportunity to present my project Drupal for Facebook, at the San Francisco Drupal Users Group.
Drupal for Facebook let's you build Facebook Apps with Drupal. These apps allow users to register on your site using their facebook password. Or, place your content within facebook.com. It's flexible, lets you build features the way you're used to (The Drupal Way), and can give your sites social features that would otherwise be impossible.
Big thanks to Conrad for providing the video. And to John for inviting me to speak, and everyone at Parisoma for hosting.