drupal-planet

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending DrupalCamp Asheville.  It was a great time to see some old faces and meet some new ones.  For me these events are less about the sessions and more about the other Drupaleers I get to meet in person.  

Entities are a new and exciting concept in Drupal 7 and a few modules are starting to make use of them. A co-worker (Scott) of mine has recently jumped on the Drupal bandwagon. He's been reading up on the Drupal development books and creating custom modules. A new module that he was working on created a new entity type. Great! Not a problem, the Drupal books and online docs provided pretty detailed steps. We ran into a wall however when we attempted to theme it. The documentation was lacking at this point and looking over contrib modules that created entities didn't provide any entity theming examples.

Scott started digging through the code and eventually figured out how to accomplish custom entity theming.  Even better, he contributed his findings to the Drupal online documentation.  Win Win!

You can learn more about the solution he found on his blog post.  Just don't give him too hard of a time about his blog running on Wordpress.  :-)

I work quite often with Drupal doing various tasks like setting up temporary sites to test out new modules, develop custom modules, and demo Drupal's capabilities to clients and co-workers.  For years I've done this on Windows-based machines.  I've found over time that I spend quite a bit of time doing tasks that I have very little interest in, just to get to a point where I can enjoy working with Drupal.  Some of these tasks include:

I'm fairly comfortable with installing Drupal having done so many times with D6. When the D7 release candidates came around I wanted to get my feet wet so I threw up some test sites and eventually moved this blog to D7.  Everything had gone fairly smooth and I've been monitoring the logs to catch redirects, etc. that I needed to setup.  One log entry that I noticed was there was an issue with my cron running.  Ok, no problem.  I headed to my host and checked on my cron job.

Wow... I've been busy the past few months and haven't had a chance to post any drupal goodness.  I've been wanting to get back into that habit and drupal 7 provided the perfect opportunity. Up until today I had been running my drupal blog on posterous.  Posterous has served well this past year.  And while I'm all for choosing the right tool for the job, it probably makes more sense for me to use drupal for a drupal blog.  :-)  

On a project that I'm working on, a situation has arose where the client wants to display content that is both generated directly on their site and sourced from external sites (i.e. feeds).  To the end user this should be a fairly seamless experience and there are a couple of solutions that should satisfy this requirement.

Concepts to keep in mind.

• Integration of home grown content and content from external sources.
• Provide as seamless a user experience as possible.
• Some sourced content (via feeds) may only contain titles and / or teasers.
  

In an earlier article I described how we can create a drupal block to display a twitter profile widget.  This earlier method would use PHP in the block to evaluate the node each time and check if a twitter account existed.  It works great but there are other alternatives I wanted to explore.

Yesterday I started using the computed field module.  This is a CCK add-on module that executes PHP code during a node insert/update and (optionally) stores that value in the database.  I say optionally because I believe you can also set it to evaluate PHP on the fly, however for something like a twitter widget we don't need to do this dynamically.  Once the widget information is stored in the database we only need to display it.

So the objective here is to use the computed field to check if the node contains a twitter account.  If it does then we simply compute the widget code and save it.  If not, we leave it blank.  So let's get started.

I'm putting together a site that has a content type called Company.  Each company may or may not have a twitter account where they broadcast updates.  The requirement is to display a twitter widget on each company node if one exists.  

My first thought was to search through the list of custom modules instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.  I found several twitter-related modules, however nothing seemed to fit the bill.  The closest module was the twitter module but that connects users accounts to their twitter accounts.  I need something to connect companies (as nodes).

Later through a google search I found that twitter.com offers widgets, and specifically a profile widget.  The profile widget, which you can now see on the right side of this blog, provides the html/script code to place inside of your website to display the twitter feed of any account.  We can use this widget and create a drupal block with some PHP code to pull the twitter account from the company node and display this widget.

It's been a few months since I've been able to do much with Drupal, but I recently attended the DrupalCamp at the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) this past weekend.  This was particular exciting for myself because I had yet to attend a Drupal event.  Being in Charlotte I'm not too aware of many drupal users in the nearby area.  Even many of those in Charlotte are on the opposite side of town.  It was great to finally meet some of these drupal folks and hopefully in the future it won't take heading out of town to catch up with them again.

I'm putting together a small drupal site for a group of very non-technical users.  There are three departments that together make up the whole team.  Each department has different responsibilities (i.e. roles / permissions) on the site.  I needed to find an easy way for this role management to be handled by department heads and not the site administrator (user #1).  

A couple of modules exist that provide role management capabilities / permissions.  These include the RoleAssign and Roll Delegation modules.  These modules were not ideal however.