Back in June of last year when Google, Bing and Yahoo! introduced Schema.org I wrote about how it would be a game changer for the semantic web. The problem was that it was difficult at best to implement semantic vocabulary on a website, even in Drupal 7. But that has all changed now.

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I am just starting to get familiar with Drupal 7's Commerce modules. The first thing I noticed after enabling the standard Commerce modules was that doing so created a Shopping Cart Block that could be added to any Region. However, placing the default shopping cart block into a region caused the block to be shown at all times, even if it was empty. While some may define this always visibable (and often empty) shopping cart as a subconscious "call to action", I find it simply annoying.

I confess that in several day dreaming sessions, Acquia has puts me up for a few weeks to teach me how to code Drupal to accomplish my requirements. But in the real world, I have to look for non-coding ways to accomplish what I want by using modules and methods already provided by people who are a lot more knowledgeable about such things. In researching this issue/desire, I came across a threaded discussion in which Ryan Szrama, the author of Drupal Commerce, wrote "...you don't actually have to use the core cart block at all. You can still use the same View and just add a Block display to it. Disable the core block and voila! Hide when empty will probably work just fine." Several posters after which continued to discuss coding fixes to hide empty shopping carts.

Crickets sounds.....

I think we have all felt the pain at least sometimes when doing admin tasks on the Drupal backend. Trying to find your way to the right admin page without knowing the correct path, trying to find some module in the modules page and activate it etc. With the built-in basic tools it can be pretty frustrating. But worry no more because here I present you some cool modules to aid your admin pain!

Administration menu Administration menu provides a theme-independent administration interface. This module is a real time saver for all types of users. You get fast access to all the sub admin pages through the CSS/JS-based dropdown menu at the top on all pages of your site. But the functionality presented doesn't limit to just regular menu items — tasks and all kinds of actions are also listed in the menu. This enables fast access to your every day tasks. You can find a demonstration of this module from here http://www.unleashedmind.com/drupal/admin_menu/.

[http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu]

Aloha

Aloha module integrates the excellent HTML5 wysiwyg editor Aloha Editor (http://aloha-editor.org/) to Drupal. With Aloha you don't have to press the edit link of an page or article when you want to make small changes but you can do it straight in the front end! Fixing typos and adding some text hasn't been this easy&fast before. Think how much time you can save while using this module! You can find a demonstration of this module from here http://aloha.dev.mearra.com.

[http://drupal.org/project/aloha]

Coffee

Performance junkies like me like to do most of the tasks from the keyboard without the need to use your mouse/touchpad/whatever. For example in OS X people use tools like Spotlight, Alfred or LaunchBar to do all kind of tasks just using the keyboard. Well now you can use the same behavior in Drupal too! Just install Coffee and press alt+d (alt + shift + D in Opera, alt + ctrl + D in Windows Internet Explorer) and you get a Alfred-like popup where you can just start typing page names or whatever where you want to navigate. You can even define your own commands in your module with hook_coffee_command() see coffee.api.php for further documentation. You can see Coffee module in action in this screencast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikGJl69jPJw.

[http://drupal.org/project/coffee]

Module filter

While the module listing on modules page can get pretty long Module filter module comes in the rescue! With this module you can filter the modules list by either typing some keywords or using the module category listing to limit the amount of modules shown. With this module you can quickly find the module(s) you were trying to find and enable/disable them. A real life saver when handling modules!

[http://drupal.org/project/module_filter]

So what are your favorites? Are there some other modules that fall into this category and belong to your basic stack of modules that you use on every page you administer?

We kick off the Commerce Basics series with a look at the LB Robotics store site that we will be building. Ryan gives a quick tour of the site and discusses the main topics we will be focusing on, like products, taxes, discounts, checkout, and general configuration of our store.

Drupal Commerce relies heavily on the Views and Rules modules for many of its features, which allow you a lot of customization. If you need a refresher on these two modules, you can watch these other Drupalize.Me series:

• Intro to Views for Drupal 7

5m Publication date  February 22, 2012 - 7:00am

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Now that we have created our products we'll dive into the Product display content type so that we can display our products to our users. In this instance we'll start out be re-using the nodes created by Commerce Kickstart, then we create two new displays for our remaining items. We finish up by rearranging the fields on the content type using Drupal 7's manage display configuration.

8m Publication date  February 22, 2012 - 7:00am

As numerous posts out there state, this is the way to programmatically add files into Drupal 7's file module tables.

<?php
// Load the files contents
$image = file_get_contents(<path to file>);

// Returns the new file object
$file = file_save_data($image, 'public://<filename>', FILE_EXISTS_RENAME);
?>

However after working on the module CCTV (Currently getting approval for Full Project) I found that this was not enough.

For some background details, CCTV is a module that turns your Drupal site into a IP Camera capture application. Based on the users preference the application can save files up to 1 day in file size (which equates to a very large file). Due to the large file sizes generated by CCTV php runs into memory both max file php configuration and local allocated memory issues. So how do we get around this?

After digging through the file modules documentation I found the following solution.

<?php
$handle = fopen('<path to local file>', 'r');
$file = file_save_data(fopen($handle, 'r'), 'public://<filename>');
fclose($handle);
?>

This opens the file in read only mode and using the file module's function file_save_data it copies the file to the public:// file system. This not only makes your code more efficient, but also allows for bypassing around php's max file size constraints.

Category: Drupal Planetvar switchTo5x=true; stLight.options({publisher:'dr-5d208cf3-1548-8519-cb10-a07ce4f152ee'});

If you are an experienced developer ready to dive into Drupal, then take a look at the pre-conference training session “Making the Switch to Drupal.” This March 19, day long course is led by Jeff Beeman, Josh Brauer, and Chris Porter - three experts from the Drupal powerhouse Acquia. With years of experience in both Drupal development and training, you can be confident that you’ll leave with a great perspective on what Drupal can do for you - and you’ll have a great time in the process.

Through hands-on activities, several key topics in Drupal site building will be covered:

• Identification of skills needed for Drupal development.
• Strategies for building maintainable, scalable web sites.
• Module selection, configuration, and customization.
• Explanation of the different Drupal data types and when to employ them - including content types, taxonomies, and views.
• Best practices for Drupal code development.
• Navigation of the Drupal community and how to find help.

Although no prior Drupal experience is required, it will be helpful to have knowledge of CSS, HTML, as well as a programming language such as PHP, .NET, or Java.

This pre-conference training session is held on Monday, March 19, 2012 - the day before the conference begins. Therefore, you won’t have to worry about missing any valuable conference events if you decide to enroll in this course.

Visit Acquia’s blog for more detail, or visit the bottom of the registration page if you’re ready to sign up.

There is no doubt that Drupal 7's admin is light years better from a usability perspective. Yet, even with all the enhancements, we find site admins still stumbling to manage their content. Over the last few months we have worked out a set of enhancements that have made our clients lives much easier. So we thought we would share.

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Start:  2012-12-01 (All day) America/New_York Online meeting (eg. IRC meeting) Organizers:  Dries catch

For those who missed it, the Drupal 8 feature freeze date was announced at http://buytaert.net/drupal-8-feature-freeze-december-1st-2012 as December 1, 2012. That means if there's something you want to see in Drupal 8, now is the time to make it happen. By this time next year, we'll be in polishing and bug fix phase.

Core

A few months ago I had to develop a Drupal 7 website that was supported by advertising.
After some research I realized that there were no current advertising modules for Drupal 7.
The Advertisement module is the de facto advertisement module for Drupal but a Drupal 7
version wasn't even under development.
So I decided to develop a new contrib module for featuring advertisements on Drupal 7 that was easy-to-use and provided

Entities in Drupal 7 simplify and centralize common logic that, in earlier versions of Drupal, was duplicated in several places, or only usable in specific modules. There are, however, many features (such as saving entities!) that did not make it into Drupal 7. The Entity API module fills in these missing gaps in the core and goes a step farther by simplifying definition of new entity types, and integration with contrib modules such as Views, Rules, and Features.

Background

I wanted to create a view which lists all nodes of different content types that link to the current node displayed on the page. The nodes link via node reference. Since node references only work in one way, and I wanted to get the node references of different content types linking to the current node, I couldn't (didn't know) how to achieve this easily with just a plain view.

The solution I came about was to embed a view to display the different nodes that link to the current one, and feed that view a list of node ids of the linked nodes.

Four different content types with four different node reference fields linked to our node. To get the nids we need to query four different tables.

To get the nids from the four tables in one trip to the database, we can use the union syntax.

Drupal DatabaseAPI union syntax

• Create the different select queries.
• Union the queries to each other like below
  $subquery_1->union($subquery_2)->union($subquery_3)->union($subquery_4);
• Execute the first query.

Code example

Below you find the actual queries to query four different node reference tables.

/** * field_data_field_col_ref_place * field_data_field_entity_ref_place * field_data_field_occ_ref_place * field_data_field_place_ref_place */ $subquery_1 = db_select('field_data_field_col_ref_place', 'cp') ->condition('cp.field_col_ref_place_target_id', $nid, '=') ->fields('cp', array('entity_id')); $subquery_2 = db_select('field_data_field_entity_ref_place', 'ep') ->condition('ep.field_entity_ref_place_target_id', $nid, '=') ->fields('ep', array('entity_id')); $subquery_3 = db_select('field_data_field_occ_ref_place', 'op') ->condition('op.field_occ_ref_place_target_id', $nid, '=') ->fields('op', array('entity_id')); $subquery_4 = db_select('field_data_field_place_ref_place', 'pp') ->condition('pp.entity_id', $nid, '=') ->fields('pp', array('field_place_ref_place_target_id')); $subquery_1->union($subquery_2)->union($subquery_3)->union($subquery_4); $nids = $subquery_1->execute()->fetchCol(); Remarks

The items you retrieve need to be of the same type (for example integers) or a union won't be possible.

Tags: drupaldatabaseAPIplanet drupal

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