Library Web Chic » Drupal

New Drupal tricks

Karen — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:50:28 +0000

I’m working on a Drupal project right now where I’m doing a lot of with Views and CCK. Most of my project always seem to involve both of these modules and it seems like every time I work with them I discover that I’ve only really scratched the surface in terms of using them. Last week I delved into the realm of Menu Tabs. Menu Tabs allow you to have a single page with several tabs each one which is a different view. This is a REALLY cool trick because it means that you can take tabs and attach them to a given page or type of page. You can for example attach a tab with a given view to a user page. In the case of my project, I’m using this to list a users content in a tab on their user page rather than has a separate page that they go to or having to deal with the less than ideal Drupal content page. It also allows you to take Organic Group content like My Groups or My Unread items and make them tabs within a user’s page. Personally I can think of lots of ways to use this. One thing I’d like to do is use it so that I could attach a new tab with a view to certain types of nodes. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet but I have high hopes.

Another new piece of views I’ve been learning about is View Attachments. Like Menu tabs, View Attachments allow you to associate several views with a single page. But what attachments allow you to do is stack multiple views all within the same page in an non-tabbed fashion. The classic example of this is the Calendar Module, which although it is its own model, leverages Views heavily to make great calendars. In the past I’ve used the Events module to create list of events, but I’m trying CCK Date and Calendar for this project and so far its working out great. My biggest concern? How to get signups to work on Nodes with repeating dates. Since the signup is attached to the single node it seems like using the repeating functionality is a no go if you want to use signups.

Calendar is just one way in which you can use Attachments in Views. I’ve been reading a book from Packt Publishing called Drupal 6 Attachment Views that demonstrates a number of different ways to use Attachments within Views. I’ve learned alot from it, but ironically I’ve actually found its explanations of how to theme views of the most use. (Fuller review of the book later.

The last trick I discovered this week is that I could create custom date formats. I learned this working on my project building an Event Calendar. One thing that irks me is that out of the box the calendar showed the date and the time, which to me made no sense because I could see what the date was based on where on the Calendar the event was displaying. Unfortunately, to generate the calendar I need to send the full date/time through. What I could do though was repeat the Date/Time field and format it differently for display. To do this you have to create a custom date/time format. You can do this in Administration > Site Configuration > Date/Time > Formats. I created a format that had only the time and for another display I was working on, one that had only the year. Then I could use either of these formats within my Views. The results are a nicer UI.

All of this seems to reinforce for me just how powerful Drupal is and also how many little tips, tricks and techniques ones can constantly be learning. By the time I’ve finished my current project I’m sure I’ll have more to share.

Update 4/21/2010

I was asked in the comments how I use the data format in the View. BasicallyÂ there are two steps:

1. Select the date field

2. Choose the format you want to use. There are several that are included by default but any new ones add you can also use

The default format is usually the full date but you can choose other formats.

CCK Computed Field Rocks

Karen — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:08:08 +0000

So I’m still working on my drupal side project. My latest issue is that I have compound fields which I want to enter and store as individual fields but display and index as a single field. After making some attempts to do this a couple different ways. I decided that Computer Field might be the solution to my problems. Computed Field allows you to use PHP to create a field based on the PHP code. You can use PHP to do math, grab dates or even process existing fields. So for my titles which actually consist of a title and subtitle field is create a computed field which concatenates the title and subtitle for indexing purposes. This is also a great way to get around the fact that FlexiField and Views don’t work together. Another way I’m using Computer Field is to build a single date field for display purposes when I actually use several fields for collecting/entering date information. I’m still thinking through all the potential uses but I’m glad I figured it out because it is helping me out considerably.

More Drupal Discoveries

Karen — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:52:29 +0000

Much of my time the last two months has been spent working on Drupal. Some of this work has been related to the library’s new intranet, some has been research for a book chapter and some is in the vein of using Drupal for digital library content.

In some ways, the last area has taught me the most about the power of Drupal, because it stretches Drupal the farthest. It also has introduced me to modules that I wouldn’t have otherwise found (some are still in dev but very cool nonetheless) and which I feel are worth pointing out to people who may have only begun to scratch the surface with Drupal.

I’m a little OCD about modules and I’ve delicious’d a ton that are of interest beside these.

My favorites from above? Contemplate, which makes it way easier to customize the look and feel of your nodes’ teaser and body without having to add specific template file to your theme. Token is pretty much indespensible as well if you want to take a value and insert it into somewhere else. It can be used to customize forms for the person logged in or with Automatic Nodetitle to use a field such as the filename of a file uploaded as the node’s title. Workflow and Rules help to control what happens (field updated, email sent) when nodes move from one state to another and establish those states (for example: Approved, Submitted, Review). Flexifield and Conditional Field help make CCK smarter and ImageCache and Imagecache Actions make mass image (jpg, gif, png) manipulation simpler.

Working with Drupal I’m truly amazed sometimes with what is possible with it. Everytime I work with it I get new ideas about how I might use it.

Drupal and TIFFs

Karen — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:23:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a prototype using Drupal for digital library content but one major issue I’m encountering is how Drupal deals with TIFFs. Drupal documentation is at best spotty and it is difficult sometimes to determined if modules (Image or ImageField) support TIFFs. What I’d like to be able to do is use FileField (since ImageField upon testing doesn’t support TIFFs) to add TIFFs and then convert these into JPEGs. After about 2 days of digging, I haven’t found an answer. ImageCache would be perfect, except it doesn’t deal with TIFFs. It seems like ImageMagick is capable of changing TIFFs into JPEGs but this hasn’t been integrated into Drupal as far as I can tell.

So I’ve reached a stalemate at this point. Does anyone out there have experience with making Drupal play nice with TIFFs?

Making the popup Views Menu go bye bye in Drupal

Karen — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:34:00 +0000

One of the things that people found irritating in Drupal was that a dynamic mouse-over menu appeared on all our views when people were logged in. Half the time this made the views impossible to use because the menu covered actual clickable content.

We desperately needed to do something about this. So I started to look at views and discovered that the code which generates this is located in views-view.tpl.php . The problem is that this file is by default kept in the views module itself. So if you change it it gets override everytime you update a the Views module. The solution. Copy the views-view.tpl.php file into my theme and make the changes on it there. This meant deleting the following lines

Once I made the change I also needed to refresh my theme templates to haave the changes take effect. All in all it was a pretty simple change to fix a BIG usability problem.

Drupal Learning Curve

Karen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:23:37 +0000

There is an interesting post over at ALA Techsource about whether or not Drupal has too steep a learning curve for libraries. The post was prompted by a letter from Kyle Jones in Decemberâ€™s American Libraries in which he said that Drupal has a “steep learning curve”. As someone who has been working with Drupal and whose library has a homegrown CMS because of that steep learning curve, I’d like to comment. First, yes Drupal has a steep learning curve but I think that it is important to keep two things in mind.

All CMS have a pretty steep learning curve. I’ve used Joomla, Drupal, and Plone none of them have a UI that is up to snuff in my opinion. This is one of the reasons we built our CMS at UH. In fact, several people have commented to me that it was “the best CMS interface” they’d ever seen. One reason I think we get these kinds of comments is because we really wanted to make it dead easy to use. It isn’t as easy as we or the librarians would like, but it is world’s better than Drupal (a lesson some folks at our library are learning as we implement our Drupal-backed intranet).
Drupal is getting better, and better with each version upgrade. The interface for simple pages, once you add a WYSIWYG module is quite good. The Panels module in particular is getting closer to the type of functionality we’d like to see in a CMS because it allows you to deal with different sections of a give page in context and allows you to easily put different things into them. Drupal is on the right track but it is going to take some time to get there. The Drupal folks ought to take a page from the WordPress UI redesign which I personally think is great. Maybe libraries should think about helping to make the UI better by either contributing code or features requests.

Second, for people who want to learn Drupal there are lots of good resources out there. I’ve posted about a few of them here before. Personally I love Packt’s book on Drupal. I’ve never learned so much or been so enthused after reading a tech book. For those folks who want real world experience, the drupal4lib camp taking place in February is full but look for streamed content as well as stuff posted afterwards. Also, check out the slides from my Open Source CMS preconference. There is stuff here on WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I also can say that there is going to be a chapter on Drupal in a book I’m working on. As a result, I’m likely to be creating some tutorial videos and you’ll see more Drupal posts here for sure.

More Drupal fun

Karen — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:00:08 +0000

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.Â 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.Â 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.

Drupal4Lib camp

Karen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:48:06 +0000

Sometimes serendity is so terrific. I started a conversation with Amanda Etches-Johnson at Internet Librarian about the need for a Drupal in libraries conference or unconference. Then we dragged John Blyberg and into the mix. The result was the following:

Darien Library will be hosting a “Drupal4Lib Camp” on Friday, February 27, 2009 from 9 am to 4 pm.

The camp will be an opportunity for libraries who are working with Drupal, or interested in implementing Drupal, to get together, share experiences, solve problems, and collaborate. This unconference will be a combination of a series of 10 min lightning talks given by Drupal veterans in the morning followed by break-out sessions in the afternoon.

Audio and video from Drupal4Lib Camp sessions will also be streamed lived online.

There is no registration fee. However, participation is limited to 70.Â Please register for the Drupal4Lib Camp at http://drupalib.interoperating.info/node/167

Review of Book Drupal Multimedia

Karen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:35:51 +0000

As I have mentioned several times on this blog I’ve been doing a lot of work with Drupal of late. One way I’ve been learning about Drupal is through a series of books by Packt publishing. The most recent one is entitled “Drupal Multimedia”.

This book provides an excellent overview of how to use Drupal for multimedia. It discusses how to incorporate images, video and sound into your Drupal site. In describes Drupal modules which can be used to manage each of these types of content. What is really nice about this book is that it clearly describes the differences between the modules and their strengths and weaknesses. Its comparison of Image and ImageField is particularly good. It also discusses the configuration options for the different modules. Another strength of this books is that is clearly outlines how to use CCK and Views to manage and display media.

One way in which this book excels over other books is the fact that this book goes into detail of how to customize Drupal template files to better handle media. One key set of customizations that the book discusses is how to embed media. Images can be embedded in a more usable fashion using the Lightbox module. The author also outlines how to use images as part of slideshows and galleries. A gallery function comes with the Image module. But the book delves deeper into galleries and show how to create them using Views, Taxonomies and the customization of templates.

Customizations can also be made to better display video files. Either those uploaded to the site or those from third party services such as Blip.tv, YouTube or JumpCut to name a few. Local videos can also be nicely displayed by using the jQuery Media module. This module takes a media link and wraps it in the appropriate media player. This works with both video and audio files.

Like images, audio has it own module. This or the File Field module can be used to add audio to Drupal. Another cool customization for sound files that the book discusses is how to allow users to create their own playlists.

This book is chock full of helpful tips on how to handle media within Drupal. It has terrific examples not only of administrative configuration but also relevant PHP needed to customize templates. Drupal is an extremely powerful platform but the accompanying documentation available is lacking, particularly for the most recent version (6.x). This book helps to fill in major gaps in the documentation available on the Drupal website. Additionally, it contains some of the most easy to read documentation I’ve been of customizing themes and templates.

The only downside of this book is the fact that several of the modules it reccomends were still being updated for Drupal 6 at the time of publication. This means some of the directions and screenshots don’t match the current interface exactly. Additionally, the following modules mentioned in the book still haven’t been updated from Drupal 6.

This aside though. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned SO much from it. I’ve been working with Drupal for about a year and learning as I go via books and hands on experience. This book gave me a much better sense of what Drupal is capable of in terms of media. I actually know where to start for a change. Additionally, I actually developed a useful understand themes and templates enough so I can make changes. If you want to incorporate media into your Drupal site I HIGHLY recommend this book.

Learning Drupal 6

Karen — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:55:54 +0000

For the last year I’ve been thinking about using Drupal. In the last month, I decide that it would be a potentially good fit for a couple of web projects (one work and one professional development) that I have going on. This week I started work on the simpler of those two projects: a site which is for one of my ALA groups. Getting Drupal installed is a snap. So is choosing a theme if you want to use one that already exists, either one of the default or adding one to your installation from the Drupal theme repository.

For me the challenge was understanding two things: Drupal modules and the block model that Drupal operates on. Like WordPress plugins, Drupal modules can be lots of different things from new kinds of content one can add to new ways of displaying existing content etc. The biggest thing is finding ones that do what you want and are compatible with the version of Drupal you are running. One downside to running version 6 of Drupal is that many of the modules haven’t been updated for this version yet. Still there were several modules that I’m interested in installing including:

The modules that I’d most like to see updated ASAP so that I can use them?

The block model in Drupal proved to be more challenging. Blocks in Drupal are bit of content that you add to particular regions in your layout. By default when you put a block in a region in appears there on every page. You can tell blocks to only appear on certain pages but this is a little bit more complicated. There are several different kinds of blocks but blocks don’t include the main content of the node ie. the body of a page or story, etc. Drupal provides you with an interface which highlights and names what the different regions of the template are that you can put blocks in to and allows you to select which blocks you want to put in a particular region via drag and drop. This is a little bit like the WordPress widgets interface. Understanding how all this worked took a little bit of experimentation on my part. I picked things up pretty quickly though and for a site with a single unified template I can see how this functionality and interface would work really well.

What I’m still trying to figure out is how Drupal would work for a more complicated site which has several different templates for different types of pages. I really haven’t determined this yet, but keep in mind I’ve only been working with Drupal for about a week. So my knowledge is pretty limited at this point. The more you work with a piece of software the better you learn it. Case it point, I’ve been using WordPress for my blog since 2005 and only now am starting to discover some of the more powerful content management like things I can do with it. I’m hoping as I spend more time with Drupal that I can learn more about it and use it to its fullest potential.

In the meantime, I’ve onlyÂ been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I knew that it was powerful because Ann Arbor District Library uses it for their website and I knew it could be used to facilitate group communication, collaboration and interaction (code4lib uses it for their website). What I didn’t know was how to make it do what I wanted. Granted I’m still learning that, but there is so much good stuff here that I can’t help but be excited. (If only I had more time to play!) Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be able to point you to some of my Drupal handiwork. But that means I have to get a few more things installed and configured first.