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contributing to the Drupal community

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Computerminds loves Drupal and gives back through contributing back code, sponsoring events, sharing knowledge and organising Drupal meet-ups. We support over 50 Drupal projects, and regularly contribute patches and fixes.

Drupal publishing queues

15th Feb 2011

Have you ever wanted to create a 'queue' of content that would be published at a regular interval? I have.

It seems like this should be one of those things that should be nice and easy to do with Drupal: Set up a nodequeue, schedule some kind of rule to pop the first item off the front of the queue and publish it. But try as I might there just didn't seem to be any kind of nice integration between nodequeue and rules. So I investigated adding Rules integration to Nodequeue, and it looked far from simple, so I decided...

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Certified to Rock field

19th Jan 2011

Certified to Rock is a site that allows you to look-up Drupal.org user names, and
see their 'certified to rock' score.

CertifiedToRock.com is a way that community members and employers can get a
sense of someone's involvement with the Drupal project. The site uses a custom
algorithm that gathers publicly available information which is then distilled
down into a score on a scale from one to eleven.

I've been wanting to build an easy way to bring this rating into a Drupal site to add an additional metric to user profiles. Until recently this wouldn't have been a simple undertaking...

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Views data exports

24th Nov 2010

Views is the king in Drupal land when it comes to making lists of your data, rightly so, it does a wonderful job of making it easy to choose the data you want to list. It also allows you to render your list in various forms, lists, tables. RSS feeds or even jump menus. So if you want to make a list and render it as CSV or XML, then you naturally turn to views, and find that currently you really have two options:

Let me talk about Views Datasource before...

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Facebook like views integration

12th Nov 2010

Facebook is rapidly taking over the planet, and Drupal is arguably trying to do the same. Facebook added the concept of 'liking' a webpage to their array of social tools a while ago. Drupal modules quickly added the ability to 'like' content on your site.

This is all well and good, but what about getting some of that data back into Drupal?

Suppose that you have an image gallery, and you want people to be able to rate the images, by 'liking' them using Facebook like. What you'd really like to be able to do then is build a 'top...

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Aegir HTTP basic authentication

11th Nov 2010

Aegir is a system for managing sites using Drupal and drush. We use it to manage this site in fact.

However, we use a fairly old version. As a precursor to doing some more work on the backup management I wanted to get my head around the new version of Aegir, and the object orientedness.

There's a really useful tutorial over on the Aegir community site:

http://community.aegirproject.org/node/75

That shows you how to add options to Aegir sites and pass the information into the backend.

The tutorial mentions a possible real life use of implementing HTTP basic authentication on a site...

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Page manager redirect

1st Jul 2010

Quite often you need to redirect a particular path on a Drupal site, there are a number of ways to do this, but most involve writing PHP code. Also, it's not hugely easy to do things like redirect node/%node but only when %node is a 'image' node, posted on a Tuesday. The awesome Page manager module, and a little utility module we wrote changes that.

Page manager redirect Drupal module exposes a 'task handler' to Page manager. This means that we can do a 'task' when page manager matches a path, and other conditions pass; The task that Page manager...

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Views content cache

12th Jun 2010

Views is awesome. You get a ton of flexibility and power, but that comes at a price: Some of the queries that views produces are less than optimal, and the rendering of results can take a long time. Views 2.6 introduced a nice solution to some of the issues, with the introduction of caching plugins.

Views itself comes with a single cache plugin (okay, okay two if you're really counting) that is time-based. So you can say: "I don't care if I show content that's 6 hours old" and it'll handle it fine. I've been thinking for a while that...

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