Redkey’s Blog

New Drupal module: Viewfinder

Just wanted to share a new Drupal module I've just created, ahead of submitting it to drupal.org, called Viewfinder. At the moment, given a content type, it will find all views that has that content type in it's filter. It will also attempt to find blocks that may have those views called with PHP in its body.

Download the Viewfinder module.

To install and use, do the following:

1. Install the module as normal. 
2. Navigate to administer >> build >> modules. 
3. Enable Viewfinder.
4. The menu item should then appear under Admin > Views > Viewfinder.

Easy.

This module is particularly useful when you need to check where updates to a CCK content type may affect views and blocks in a site that was built by another developer. We're using this in a client project now to help us do exactly this.

Please tell us what you think.

Drupal 7: first impressions

In the last post I mentioned that I was going to be trying out Drupal 7 for a new service we're biulding for Redkey.

Well, it didn't take me long to realise that Drupal 7 is not quite ready for prime time yet. This should not be a surprise because it is, after all, still in Alpha. But, what I did see was quite exciting.

The user interface is just so much better. The D7UX effort led by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt did a fantastic job with this. Here's a summary:

• There is now a standard admin toolbar at the top.
• Contextual admin tasks can now be made to appear in overlays - useful when you need to stay on the page. Lookswise, the overlay can still be improved as it still looks 'raw'. This is also great for agencies because showing the ugly admin tools to a client wasn't always pleasant.
• On-hover contextual links work ilke in the D6 Admin module but with a neater UI. Although I have ot say I quite like the minimalist admin-icon in the new D6 Admin module.
• Customisable shortcuts make frequently used links easy to reach. We had a custom module for this built for client projects, but it is now standard in D7.
• Vertical tabs make the UI so much cleaner and less daunting. This is available as a module in D6, but standard in D7.
• I have not yet looked under the hood of D7 but it sounds like a lot of performance enhancements in Pressflow 6 is now in D7. The D6 to D7 migration page also lists various changes that have been incorporated at low level.
• The blocks management is still pretty much the same, which is disappointing. The admin for blocks is still pretty dire and needs a complete rethink, with the visibility setting a priority item to improve on, IMHO.

That was just  quick rundown, and the reason we don't want to use it yet for our little project is because a lot of what we need are sitll unavailable and would have taken us too long to contribute to. These include the Location module and OpenLayers.

Fieldgroup will not be ported to core, even though CCK has been. It looks like this is part of a larger issue. There's a call for volunteers for porting fieldgroup, but pesonally I think the requirements look overengineered.

For the little project we're working on, we will go back to Drupal 6 for now, but D7 looks like quite a leap forward.

Drupalhire - Drupal jobs, projects and talent

We're building Drupalhire.net to meet the demand for a single, dedicated location for hiring Drupal developers, posting Drupal project RFPs and looking for Drupal work.

If you are involved in any way at all with Drupal, please help us build the service that you want to see by visiting http://drupalhire.net and filling in the very short survey (it'll take you just 2 minutes). We will also be inviting beta users from the survey respondents (beta users can submit job posts for free).

Taking Drupal 7 for a spin (+ new site for the Drupal community)

To D7 or to not D7. Yes, it's still in Alpha (Alpha 5, at the time of writing), but what better time to be involved in getting to know it and guide it into Beta. 

Drupal Acquia Partners in Central London

Quite surprised by this, but Redkey is only one of four registered Acquia Partner in Central London:

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Drupal Twitter module direct message patch

My patch for sending Twitter direct messages with the Drupal Twitter module is now in the 6.x-2.x-dev version.

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Getting a Drupal 6 WYSIWYG editor + IMCE + CCK field 'Add more' to party

It seemed like a straightforward feature: to create a CCK field with unlimited values, editable using a WYSIWYS editor including image uploads into the editor. The solution is actually trickier because out of the many possible combinations and settings for getting a WYSIWYG editor and file uploading to work, only this combo seems to work, across browsers (including Google Chrome):

• Wysiwyg API with TinyMCE
• IMCE
• IMCE Wysiwyg API bridge

Anyway, tried these, and none of them worked for what we needed:

• FCKEditor module 6.x-1.3: doesn't work with unlimited value fields - removes all editor instances when adding new values!
• FCKeditor module 6.x-2.0-beta1: doesn't remove the editor from other fields but new 'add another item' value does not appear with the editor instantiated.
• FCKEditor with Wysiwyg API: can't seem to enable file upload.
• YUI RTE + YUI modules: doesn't work with unlimited value fields.

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Fine-grained #weight values in Drupal

This may not be immediately obvious but whenever you need to assign #weight values in Drupal, for example when ordering form elements, you can use floats as well as integers. This is useful if you need to insert a field in between two fields with weights that are 1 apart:

$form['field_a']['#weight'] = 1;
$form['field_b']['#weight'] = 1.5;
$form['field_c']['#weight'] = 2;

I found this to be useful sometimes when I need to insert a field (in hook_form_alter) in between two fields generated by other modules, e.g. to insert field_b above field_c, I'll just do:

$form['field_b']['#weight'] = $form['field_b']['#weight'] - 0.5;

Job done.

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Drupal + great design = winning charity site

It's been a while since the last post on this blog, hasn't it? Well, we've been really busy with some interesting Drupal projects and how time flies! We'll let you know what the sites are shortly (they're almost live)!

Now we all know that Drupal is becoming one of the most popular open-source platforms for web application and website development. This is particularly true amongst non-profit organisations and social enterprises.

However, one of the myths I hear time and again is that all websites built with Drupal look the same. This couldn't be further from the truth. A Drupal website can be designed in any way we like, just as any other website. If this wasn't the case, large, brand-conscious businesses like Sony, MTV and Yahoo! would not be using it for building their public-facing sites.

For example, here's an interesting article on some design elements for charity sites: 8 Tips to Design a Charity Website. Notice that a lot of the sites in the example were built with Drupal.

We have built numerous sites for our non-profit clients, not one of them look the same, and they all look fantastic :)

Update: And minutes after writing this, I came across this Drupal group on design and theming, Design for Drupal, via NikLP's tweet.

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Site launch: Sustainable Tourism Zone of the Caribbean

Last week saw our latest work launched successfully to a forum audience in Guadaloupe in the Caribbean: STZC.ORG.

The client is an EU funded research project whose aim is to encourage tourist destinations in the Caribbean to measure and improve on sustainable tourism practices.

The site's users, i.e. the destination managers of various tourist destinations in the Caribbean, are able to complete destination profiles and evaluation questionnaires on the site, and then generate PDF reports automatically. The administrators are also gien the tools to edit site content themselves, upload files, create user accounts for each destination and have access to all the destination reports. The site is built to support three languages for all content: English, French and Spanish and the site administrators are able to translate all content themselves.

STZC.ORG was built using the Drupal open source system, with customised modules to handle the evaluation questionnaires and report generation. Extensive use of Drupal's CCK and Views modules were used to handle the large questionnaires (150 questions, spread over 4 forms, in three different languages). As the budget was tight, any design work was kept to a minimum, making use of Drupal's default templates as much as possible.

Users were allowed to use the site at launch and they successfully managed to varry out tasks on the site smoothly, thanks to the work we put in making to make the user interface intuitive and easy to use.

We are proud of this launch as it fits in with our aim of increasing non-profit and 'green' projects in our portfolio.

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