Drupal Blog - Tips and Module Reviews

The Week in Drupal: May 18, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:49:30 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: May 11 - 18, 2012.

Drupal News

Drupal.org Website Is Stepping Up To Drupal 7

Application Process Opens Today For Drupal Community Cultivation Grants

Great Posts and Tutorials

Impending Drupal Site Launch? Use the List

Connecting Facebook with Drupal, the easy way: Part 1 and Part 2

How to Conditionally Display a Value from Two Fields in Views

Measuring Community Participation in Open Source Projects: Data from Drupal.org

Modules Unraveled Podcast: Steven Jones and The Aegir Project

Filter/Search on multiple fields with Views 3.x

File import improvements for Migrate 2.4

Drupal 7.14 API Compatibility Breaking Change

Drupal with Twig templates

Interesting New Modules

Auto Upload - Removes the need for users to press the 'Upload' button for AJAX file uploads. After selecting a file, it will be uploaded automatically instead.

Detector - Build your own device database for detecting mobile devices so you can serve custom themes, etc.

Hook Priority - Allow prioritization of the Drupal's hooks.

Drummm - DRUpal Much More Monitored - This looks interesting. Like Munin or Cacti, but completely Drupal.

Apache Solr Select Sort - Displays the sort block as a form with select lists as opposed to links.

Amazon Web Services - CloudSearch Integration - Use AWS CloudSearch with Drupal

Webform External - Allows you to store the data for specific webforms in an external datasource that is defined in the settings.php file. Useful for HIPAA data that requires special handling and security.

Entity Reference Count - A field type that will count the number of entityreferences to a particular entity.

Node View Permissions - Enables permissions "View own content" and "View any content".

Permalinks to Nodepath - Switch comment permalinks from node/123/comment/456 to node/123#comment-456.

Quiz Marking - Adds scoring options for the Quiz module.

Wookmark Views - Allows the use of Wookmark's jQuery plugin with Views. This creates a a tiled effect from the items in the view.

The Week in Drupal: May 11, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:14:57 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: May 4 - 11, 2012.

Great Posts and Tutorials

Four Kitchens: Migrating old HTML files into Drupal

Commerce Module Tuesday: Commerce extra panes

Making Media Gallery work with Media 2.x

There is a module for that!: Mediatheque, a Drupal media organizer

A Look at Georgia.gov and “Why Big Sites Run Drupal”

Getting Meta Tags on Views in Drupal 7

Károly Négyesi: Progress on Entity Field Query Views Backend module

Drupal 6 Override views pager theme function

NodeOne: Features Pipexplosion - a great addition

Best Practices for Reporting Bugs

Interesting New Modules

Commerce Tickets - Allows the site admin to create a ticket purchase system.

User Access Control - Allows users to grant other users access to update their content.

User defined permissions - quickly define new permissions through the UI.

OPAC - Allows libraries to make Drupal their public catalogue.

Simplenews SMS - Adds SMS Functionality to Simplenews using Twilio.

WFCC - Copy Webform components from one form to another.

OG Extras - Ceated because the default views and blocks that come with Organic Groups only work in Panels. It restores some of the functionality of the D6 version of Organic Groups.

AMQP - Provides methods for publishing and consuming messages from an AMQP message queue (http://amqp.org/) compatible server, such as RabbitMQ (http://rabbitmq.org).

The Week in Drupal: May 4, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:36:34 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: April 27 - May 4, 2012.

Drupal News

Drupal 7.14 and Drupal 6.26 released - A security release for D7, bugfixes only for D6. The security issues are described here: SA-CORE-2012-002.

Dries Buytaert: Announcing Spark: authoring improvements for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8

Update on DrupalCon São Paulo 2012

Drupal core announcements: Save the Date: Midwest Drupal Developer Summit in Madison, WI, July 26-27, 2012

Great Posts and Tutorials

Drupal Views now supports queries of Google Analytics report data

How to bootstrap Drupal in custom scripts

Selenium: testing Javascript with Simpletest on Drupal 7

Mobile Drupal optimization results

Achievements 7.x-1.5 released

Liberate your Drupal data for a service-oriented architecture (using Redis, Node.js, and MongoDB)

Commerce Module Tuesday: Commerce Card on File

Interesting New Modules

Menu Select - For responsive design websites, allows menus to be rendered as select boxes.

Save Form State - Auto save forms using the jQuery Sisyphus plugin, which is a lightweight jQuery plugin.

VoIP Poll - Facilitates the creation of polls that are accessible via web, phone and SMS.

Registration Commerce 2 - Integration between Entity Registrations and Drupal Commerce enabling paid registrations.

Article Templater - Allows content authors to create content templates and reuse them within any content type you have on your Drupal site.

Obnoxious Overlay - Best module description ever. Go read it.

addressfield_tokens - Extends the addressfield module by adding full token support. Lets you use pieces of the address separately.

Views Sexy Throbber - A modal HUD-style loading graphic for Views. It looks like this screenshot. (SFW)

Commerce Actions - A bunch of actions to use with Rules module on your Drupal Commerce store.

Views Sprites - A sprite generator for Views. What?!

Yelp Reviews Plus - Provides a block which displays Yelp reviews about a specific business with the option of displaying review excerpts.

Conditional Variables - Allows for changing Drupal variables depending on configurable conditions. It currently utilizes Rules, but may support additional methods down the road, such as Context.

Role Delay - enables the configuration of one or more user roles that all new users are automatically granted after a specified period of time from registration.

Password Flow - In core, when a user clicks on the password reset link they end up on a page with a login button, which is potentially confusing. Password flow allows you to remove this additional step and send the user directly to their user edit page to reset their password.

The Week in Drupal: April 27, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:57:28 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last weeks: April 20 - 27, 2012.

Drupal News

Google announces Summer of Code results for 2012 - Drupal gets 13 projects!!

DrupalCon Munich Accepting Session Submissions

Drupal core announcements: Future of javascript in Drupal 8

Drupal 8 Initiatives: Drupal 8 Configuration System Funding Proposal

Drupal 8 Initiatives: Drupal 8 Web Services Funding Proposal

Drupal Association News: Tell us what you think in the Membership Survey

Great Posts and Tutorials

Palantir: Scalable Navigation Patterns in Responsive Web Design

Module Development with NodeJS Integration

Easy Drupal CDN integration for fun and profit

An improved way to put content in panels - introducing the Node Pane module

LESS is More

Drupal will become more MongoDB friendly

An overview of changes in Display Suite 7.x-2.x

Case Study: Building an Auto Dealership Portal with Drupal 7

Interesting New Modules

Content Menu - This looks like a pretty amazing replacement for Drupal's menu management UI. There's a blog post and screencast for it here.

Core Override - This module allows you to override individual functions in core modules without patching core.

Views argument cache - Allows you clear cached Views for specific arguments.

Class Style Filter - This module provides an input filter that allows WYSIWYG embedded images to be restyled using Drupal's Image Styles functionality.

Commerce Webform - Like UC Webform, but for Drupal Commerce

Node Access Config - Allows the cooperation between various node access modules when they are installed in parallel.

Views Raw SQL - Allows arbitrary SQL expressions to be added to Views, currently as fields and sorts.

Context Active Menu Tree - Context plugin to expose the active menu as a context condition.

Text Format Access - Provides an ability to configure global or per-role access to text formats of particular field.

Field Collection Chart - Adds new field formatter to "field_collection" fields that allows users to display their fields as Google charts.

Node access book - Gives content access permissions on a book child page if users have access to the root of the book.

The Week in Drupal: April 20, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:22:27 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last weeks: April 13 - 20, 2012.

Drupal News

DrupalCon Munich: Submit a session for Munich until May 11!

Improved Session Selection Process for DrupalCon Munich

Great Posts and Tutorials

Creating a Custom Apache Solr Facet

Build advanced content listings – with Apache Solr, Search API, Facet API

Squeeze! Save disk space with MySQL compression - Not totally Drupal, but useful for Drupal devs.

Interesting New Modules

Image Delta Formatter - P provides a custom formatter for imagefields, that allows the user to specify which values (deltas) should be displayed.

Hierarchical Term Formatter - Provides hierarchical term formatters to display a taxonomy term reference on, say, a node as Parent > Child, rather than just Child.

Feeds hierarchical taxonomy - Import nodes with taxonomies such as Clothes > Children > Blue and automatically create terms as a hierarchical taxonomy tree.

Bendy - A feature module that creates a content rotating banner using the Views Slideshow module, Client-side Adaptive Image module and some CSS sorcery.

UUID Link - Allows use to link to entities using UUIDs, rather than ids. This prevents links breaking as content moves from one environment to another.

Entity Sync - Allows Rules driven synchronization of entities between Drupal installations.

Post Bookmarklet - Allows you to create bookmarklets to quickly create new nodes based on an external URL.

The Week in Drupal: April 13, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:47:03 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last weeks: April 1 - 13, 2012.

Drupal News

The Future of Drupal Governance: Resources and Next Steps

Drupal core announcements: UI for hierarchical permissions, introducing permission rules

/drupalgive initiative

UX Team update Q1

Great Posts and Tutorials

Faster Mobile Sites

Using field_attach_load() to load one node field programmatically

Multi-headed Drupal

Module Monday: Flex Slider

Larry Garfield and the Symfony Integration in Drupal 8 (podcast)

OpenAid: A Drupal Distribution for NGOs and Non-Profits

Simple HTTP authentication for Drupal sites

Using Homebrew to Support Drupal on OS X

Using Drush to Mass Delete Comments

Do you want a PM day at Drupalcon? and 5 Ways to Get More Project Management Content into Drupalcon Sessions

Navigating your way in Drupal core development

Interesting New Modules

Geofield Proximity - Adds proximity fields and filters to Views.

Commerce Userpoints Grant - Allows you to sell a "points/credits" product and then grant users userpoints based on the quantity of the product within the order. Works with Rules and Drupal Commerce.

Mobile Switch - Provides a simple theme switch functionality for mobile devices, detected by browscap.

Webform CampaignMonitor - Provides a webform component in a checkbox format that lets you subscribe users to specific lists on Campaign Monitor

Path breadcrumbs - Path breadcrumbs allows site administrator to create a custom breadcrumbs for a custom page. For example, if you create a new page using Views module you may want to set custom breadcrumbs for it.

Wysiwyg TinyMCE Clear Buttons - Adds WYSIWYG buttons that allow you to insert a breaking element that will clear floated elements above it.

Mass Apply Filter - This module will run all nodes of a specified content type through a specified filter.

Nice groups - Provides a UI for picking OG audience that's similar to the Tagging module.

Taxonomy Hierarchy Views Argument - Provides a views contextual filter (argument) that takes a taxonomy term id and sorts (and optionally filters) the matching results in order of their taxonomical relevance (first direct matches, then parent terms, child terms, and finally sibling terms).

The Week in Drupal: March 30, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:17:03 GMT

Being out in Denver last week, I didn't have time to post one of these, so here's a look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the past two weeks: March 16 - 30, 2012.

Drupal News

DrupalCon Denver Wrapup, Including Session Videos

Dries Buytaert: Streamlining Drupal core decision-making

Usability Report from the Drupal 7 UX Study at Google

Announcing DrupalCon 2013 in Portland!

The Google Summer of Code is Back for 2012!

DrupalCon Munich is around the corner: call for papers and registration open

Phase2 and Treehouse are Coming Together

Great Posts and Tutorials

Why Minify JavaScript?

How to Build a Lightbox Portfolio in Drupal 7

Extended path aliases (path to success!)

Render a block programmatically

Ubercart CRM for the iPad: My DrupalCon 2012 Twilio Developer Contest Entry

KatteKrab: The Drupal Association

Interesting New Modules

Views Field If-Else - This is a D7 views field, that compares rendered text in an if-statement, and renders a defined text for each clause.

Views Simple Pager - This module provides a simple, configurable Previous / Next pager and the elements can be reversed from "normal" display order (e.g. << Older ... Newer >> instead of << Newer .. Older >>).

Mailchecker - Implements mailcheck.js (https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck) with Drupals forms, primarily the register form.

Views Date - Allows you to do non-traditional date sorts, such as by hour of the day.

Entityreference Browser - A widget that allows you to easily find content from a entityrefrence field.

Introducting the Speedy Module

Pathologic Repair - Repair links that get broken in content from staging to production with this extension to the Pathologic module.

Panels Create node - Create nodes and add them as panes, all from within the Panels interface.

Feeds Review - Provides an intermediary Feeds Processor class that allows you to store imported items in a queue for reviewing them before import.

Image lazy - Loads images that user scrolls to view only, skip loading bunch of images which user doesn't event skim.

impress - Adds Impress.js to your drupal site Use the content type slide to create a new slide Select your options. By default it will generate a new slide right to the previous. You can select under/left/above also. Use Node queue to sort your slides

Ubercart Stock Locations - Define one or more locations and to set the stock level for each product at each of the locations independently.

Flag Signup - Enables users to signup to content via the flag module.

Distributed Blocks - Simple client/server module to share rendered blocks across different Drupal sites. Must be enabled on both sides.

Mobile App Generator - Create a mobile app quickly from a menu of pages. I saw the DrupalCon session on this. Somewhat limited, but very easy to use.

Entity Collection (Super Node) - Node collection is a module that will allow you to add parent child relationships on different content types and will help you to create content rich small micro sites inside your Drupal 7 installation .

Entity Reference Connect - This module expands Entity Reference using Subform to allow the user to create a new entity to be referenced to without having to leave the current page.

Auto Product Display - provide user an option to automatically create product display on every new product creation.

Cookie Control - Cookie Control does just that, presenting users with clear information on whether cookies are present, linking to your privacy policy (where you should have specific information about what cookies are in use), and advising users on how to adjust browser settings and what cookies mean for them.

dRealty Sandbox - dRealty is a Real Estate Module to import Listings into drupal via the RETS protocol. It aims to become a full fledged IDX solution for Drupal.

Node Archive - This module replaces this default behaviour with an archiving system.

Flag Cool Note - provides the Drupal administrator to attach a webform to a flag so that when users flag or unflag any piece of content, they can add additional information using the webform.

The Week in Drupal: March 16, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:21:13 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of March 9 - 16, 2012.

Drupal News

Distribution packaging now fully supported on Drupal.org

Response to publicly posted CSRF concerns in Drupal 7.12

Drupal core announcements: Drupal 8 initiative happenings at DrupalCon!

Content staging in Drupal - let's make a plan

Great Posts and Tutorials

A First Timer's Guide to DrupalCon

Building a Multistep Registration Form in Drupal 7

Using hook_views_alter to Add a "GROUP BY" statement

Drupal's Experience Gap, Part 1 and Part 2

How do I show Apache Solr results in Panels?

Get the raw data from a View with views_get_view_result()

Better Workflows with State Machine 2.x

Greg Dunlap and the Configuration Management Initiative for Drupal 8 (Podcast)

Extending Form API #states with regular expressions

Module Monday: Edit Limit

Interesting New Modules

Recover - "Recover exists because full site backups suck for most day to day problems...select what you want to restore By item or By time." Sounds awesome!

Cross-Browser CSS - Cross-Browser CSS is a simple module that adds the user's OS, browser and browser's version into your body tag as classes.

Webform Calculator - Provides a formula webform component, where you can enter a mathematical calculation based on the other fields.

Referer Context - This module allows you to trigger contexts based on the referer(s) of the current session.

Secrets and File Key - API to store secret tokens/keys in the database and and implementation of the API to only allow file downloading of a file when the secret token in the URL matches.

Commerce reverse payments - Indicate that a refund was given on an order.

Bounce - "The Bounce module collects non-delivery reports generated by remote mail servers, parses these non-delivery reports for response codes, and blocks further emails from being sent to email addresses that have passed a score threshold."

File Filter - This module adds an input filter that allows content creators to add themed files to the body of a node

Dipity Timeline - This module provides a views style plugin to display arbitrary data in a Dipity timeline.

References Manager - Provides an optional page for each references field with a drag 'n drop UI for sorting items via a grid of teaser node displays, or other view mode.

Views RSS: Media (MRSS) Elements - Extension module for Views RSS 2.x, providing additional set of Media (MRSS) elements and field formatters.

Complete profile - Forces the user to complete their profile before they can continue using the site.

The Week in Drupal: March 9, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:41:59 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of March 2 - 9, 2012.

Drupal News

Configuration management system now in place for Drupal 8

Dries Buytaert: Layouts for Drupal 8

Kris Vanderwater: Drupal 8: Blocks & Layouts Everywhere

Drupalcon: Birds of a Feather (BoF) Scheduler Now Available!

Great Posts and Tutorials

When and how caching can save your Drupal site

Handling long-running background tasks in Drupal 7

Creating an Image Effect to put a play button on Video thumbnails

Module Monday: Rabbit Hole

Earl Miles: The Book of Druplicon

Interesting New Modules

Stripe Webform - Integrates the Stripe and Webform modules so you can accept payments during webform submissions.

ESPN API Integration - A rich integration with ESPN's public AP!s, providing sports headlines, scores, athlete profiles, and other information.

Galleria Commerce - provides a Galleria Node Reference gallery with Drupal Commerce integration, so that users can add gallery images to their shopping cart.

Commerce coupon batch - Create hundreds of coupon codes at once.

REL links - Inserts rel links pointing up, down and sideways to give semantic scrapers clues about the site structure.

RDFviz - Renders the RDFa that your Drupal7 site is outputting in a graphical form.

Apache Solr Field Search - Extends the Apache Solr module. It lets users limit their search to a specific field instead of searching the full node text.

SEO Stats - Search-related statistics including Google PageRank for your site, in your Drupal site.

Text & Integer Field - A compound field with a text field and paired integer field.

Views block area - Put blocks in Views headers and footers.

Views Fields Compare Filter - Adds an exposed filter that allows the user to choose a comparison operation between 2 of the fields selected for the view.

Block Views Visibility - Enables you to specify block visibility based on views pages.

Profile Fields Force Filling - Force users to fill any required profile fields at login.

Image Style Quality - Set an image quality per image style preset.

The Week in Drupal: March 2, 2012

wayne@zengenuity.com — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:54:39 GMT

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of February 24 - March 2, 2012.

Drupal News

Drupal 6.25 released

Submit and vote on your Drupal.org ideas!

Great Posts and Tutorials

In search for a better admin experience for Drupal 7 users

What's New in Date and Calendar for Drupal 7

PHP Stream Filters: Compress, transform, and transcode on the fly.

Module Monday: Guest Pass

Control your Drupal Page Layout with Context and Delta

EntityFieldQuery: Let Drupal Do The Heavy Lifting (Pt 2)

Keeping Drupal Secure - How the world's largest open source CMS combines openness and security. SPOILER ALERT - It's robots!

Migrating Drupal 6 Multigroups to Drupal 7 Field Collections

Migrate Classes: Location CCK to Address Field

Add HTTP Headers Using #attached in Drupal 7

Interesting New Modules

VoIP Views - Damn! This was my idea for the Twilio DrupalCon contest. Awesome!

Flag files - Uses the Flag module to add an additional flag type to allow you to flag media files.

Image Matrix - Views style plugin and content field formatter for displaying any number of images in magazine-like layout

Diaspora Pod - Allow your drupal site to connect to the Diaspora federation just like any other diaspora pod.

PDF Watermark - a basic module for adding a textual watermark to PDFs using Ubercart's file download.

View Mode Modal - The View Mode Modal module let's you use entity view modes inside Ctools modal.

Day Tripper - Day Tripper is for displaying a number of events on an agenda along with a routing map. The drag-n-drop events are simultaneously rendered as locations on a Google Map with corresponding directions.

User Progress API - An API for fine grain event tracking of a user through your site.

Morris - Drupal implementation of Morris.js (graphing library). Provides an API, example module and views style plugin.

Watchdog Debug - Collects additional debug information for each watchdog() call and displays it on log event details page.

Boilerplates - Allows you to build a document from several remplated pieces, and have a user's information filled into placeholders.

Reverse geocoding - Determine address from coordinates in a Geofield.