More Drupal fun
I’ve been slowly pegging away at getting different things from our Intranet moved into Drupal. One thing that I was worried about was a bunch of forms which our Computer Systems department uses for account requests. The current form is emailed to our Help Desk which takes the email and transforms it into a ticket. In the past I’ve used the Web Form module for this type of thing. However, when I’ve used the Web Form module before I let it collect the data. What I didn’t realize is that you can also ask the Web Form module to send every submission of a form to a specific email address(es). Once I discovered this I was able to easily able to replicate the account forms we currently have without writing any custom code!
Lesson – If you want to use Drupal to collect data and have that data submitted someplace that can receive the data as an email then the Web Form module will save you lots of time. Just setup the Web Form so that it is submitted to an email address. Lots of services allow you to submit via email. Cases in point: Flickr, WordPress. Also many people seem to be using ping.fm to allow them to post to various social networking sites via chat, SMS and email. (For more on this check out this post) This may sound stupid to use a Drupal form to send a email to post to Flickr or WordPress, but if you are trying to create a unified portal for people and there isn’t a module that allows you to add content to these systems from within Drupal, the Web Form Module might be your best quick workaround. In the case of Flickr it also saves you the time of everyone havingt o know the library’s username and password for Flickr. I’d love to be able to do something like this with YouTube or Blip.tv because it would save us developing a module in Drupal, which while probably a more sustainable solution takes time.
Another possibility is to use the Web Form module to send SMS messages. Most wireless carriers offer their customers an email address version of their phone number. For Verizon this is your_ten_digit_phone_number@vtext.com . Granted you can only send short messages, but if you control the form then you can control the amount of input. If you want trouble reports to be received by people on their cell phones then just put their cell email into the Web Form. Voila instant SMS!
Just goes to show you that basic functionality can be extended to meet people’s needs in new ways. If you think about the problem and possible solutions creatively.