Notes from August 24th Vancouver Drupal User's Group

The notes are incomplete and might be a little out of order, so corrections and/or context would be appreciated. More people did actually talk than noted below, so add a comment if you want to point out what was important to you at this session.

Steven Wittens

He talked about JQuery http://jquery.com/ , a JavaScript library to be included in the next version of Drupal (which will have a version number of either 4.8 or 5.0, which ever the community ends up deciding).

• it makes client-side effects easy to write
• it will replace many lines of code in drupal.js with one line, re-usable
• the library itself is modular - can make plugins, for example Farbtastic demo
• makes it easy to develop JS if you're not a JS expert
• Boris Mann/SW recommended that if you're developing a module for 4.7, that also needs an Ajax library: use JQuery since it will be in 4.8/5.0.
• 1.0 not released yet, though evidently it will be released tomorrow (Friday)
• It's the first time to include a JS library in core, as the Drupal is typically skeptical of third party libraries in general, not just JS
• JQuery developers have promised maintenance and API stability, and development up until this point has indicated this will be the case
• Richard Eriksson: what about backward-compatibility? SW: seeing as how there hasn't been a major release yet, there's really no telling, but based on the development to date, it looks like there will be a commitment to compatibility between the previous major version

Károly (chx) on the Forms API

RE: a lot of this might have gone over my head, so these notes shouldn't be taken as 100% accurate

• in 4.7 you created an array then drupal_get_form with the array
• needed hackery with multi-part forms
• new way: define form in a function then return it, call drupal_get_form with the function name as the parameter
• this lets you do multi-part forms easily: it will show the name of the function in the session, find the form in the session, validate it, and submit it, then go on and render the next step.
• Jeff Eaton wrote an article on how it will work sere http://jeff.viapositiva.net/node/451 and follow-up at http://jeff.viapositiva.net/node/453
• programmatically submitting multi-part forms (RE: I just heard the phrase and forget the context)
• push model for forms: constructed the array then pushed it to drupal_get_form
• new pull model: you tell it what to pull, macros (replay the configuration steps of a Drupal site, may be useful for black box testing with Selenium): Adrian wrote the macro-recorder, something like 20 lines (RE: this was actually the second part of the pull model, I missed the first part)
• edit/delete roles by using form functions
• 4.8/5.0 access control for form fields, display of parts of nodes
• you can submit a form as if it came from a browser and use its results
• currently if you save nodes, you can save invalid nodes through node_save()
  now you can fill the node form, which will validate the form and save it

Colin Chudyk: what about upgrading modules to 4.8/5.0? -- most modules have a whole page as a form, so upgrading should be fine. Follow-up question was how long before contributed modules get updated, answer being "it depends on the author".

Pants module James Walker

Slated to be a discussion about writing modules, turned into discussion about CCK and search. SW pointed to his presentation on search at http://acko.net/blog/drupal-conference-amsterdam

Boris Mann: Tagmark

RE: no project page? Anyway, available in CVS

• module creates full nodes of bookmarks for in-site content, but also has a bookmarklet
• you could build something identical to del.icio.us
• (RE: you could even do del.icio.us right!
• weird things about the module according to BM:
• it creates a free-tagging vocabulary, which is usually unnecessary since he usually has such a vocabulary already
• should always just use the bookmarklet, not the bottom-of-node link
• needs to expose bookmark to drag to browser
• Links API: e.g. parse the links in a node, to make a view of the all the links made everywhere on the site. Future of Links API: check to see if links are stale

Subversion module - halkeye

• similar to the CVS module except ... for Subversion
• potential to create repositories e.g. when creating an organic group for a project it also creates a Subversion repository for that project
• mentioned "Programmer meets designer" http://programmermeetdesigner.com/

Boris Mann

• talked about blogclient: post nodes to your external (e.g. BlogSpot) blog. A discussion ensued about blogging hosted services, where standards not adhered to or broken, or overloaded
• portal module: aggregates tags from del.icio.us, blip.tv, Flickr available at http://drupal.org/project/portal
• discussion then ensued about lack of standards around tags, Atom API implementations (some hosted services cannot run an Atom server as specified)

Richard Eriksson

Some modules that do small tasks but that I think are great:

• Advanced User emails you when a new user signs up, and you can email entire roles and also do some advanced searching on user profile fields. (Thanks Boris for mentioning the features other than just the one I use!) http://drupal.org/project/advuser
• Comment info is a simple module that adds a "remember info" checkbox, setting a cookie like other blogging platforms do for anonymous commenters http://drupal.org/node/67414
• Akismet (as opposed to the Spam module) because it's fast and reliable, at least so far, and free for non-commercial use. Spam module can't keep up with spammers, and Bayesian filter is a resource hog. RE: I find it useful for mass-deleting deleting spam after installing Akismet. Module not hosted on Drupal.org but freely available at http://www.phpmix.org/projects/drupal/4_7/akismet Also it requires a WordPress API key: http://wordpress.com/api-keys/