Drupal

Last December I wrote up 24 specific things we've automated on Drupal, and published them as an Advent Calender -- one little nugget each day.

Last year I gave a presentation at DrupalCon about automating things using the powerful ECA Module. Here's the recording!

The recording of my talk from DrupalCon this year is now available!

This is perhaps my most technical talk, meant for developers and tinkerers who would like an easy way to get started with Drupal.

At Freelock, we're starting to use Nix to manage different PHP environments, and be able to incrementally update websites.

Kevin asks,

Is there a Drupal Add On or Widget that would allow users to sort tables as they're displayed on the website?

Hi, Kevin,

Several options here:

In the past couple days I've gotten two different questions regarding building functionality out in WordPress. This seems a bit...weird with timing, given that Drupal CMS just launched three days ago!

As we start developing mini-products to offer to our clients, we've found we actually need to group multiple products under one purchase.

Yesterday a client asked us to install Rules module (again, repeating an earlier request, when he had missed my answer that we had installed ECA instead).

We've reached the last day of the calendar, and it's time for Santa's visit! Santa has been visiting some famous places all month. With the Geocoder module, Leaflet, a Geofield, and an Address field, you can automatically put each address Santa has visited on the map!

You do need to configure a geocoder source. We're using OpenStreetmap, from the geocoder-php/nominatim-provider.

When you allow the general Internet to post comments, or any other kind of content, you're inviting spam and abuse. We see far more spam comments than anything relevant or useful -- but when there is something relevant or useful, we want to hear it!

With the AI module and the Events, Conditions, and Actions module, you can set up automatic comment moderation.

Like any use of AI, setting an appropriate prompt is crucial to getting a decent result. Here's the one we're trying out:

One of the easiest things to do with the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module is to set values on fields. You can populate forms with names and addresses from a user's profile. You can set date values to offsets from the current time. You can perform calculations and store the result in a summary field, which can make using them in views much more straightforward.

We've had several clients working with memberships, who have a single name field with the full name of a person. And then they ask us to build a directory that is sorted by last name. This is a bit hard to do if there's a first name in front of it!

Names don't follow rules very well. Some have apostrophes in them, some have multiple words -- you can't just take the last word of a name and assume that's the last name, because often it just isn't.