Drop-Down Menu for Frequently used Databases

http://drupal.org/project/jump

Thanks! Can the jump module produce a drop-down list for external links to databases such as ERIC and Firstsearch?

Mary Carrington
Wheaton College

If you want to use the jump module, you need to create nodes for your external links and something like http://drupal.org/project/cck_redirection to make them work.

If it changes often, use Jump and Views to generate the list and subject page, respectively, otherwise, just code this form by hand.

The Jump module does work with external links. The module provides blocks for menus as well as vocabularies. So, you can create a menu (admin/build/menu), and add menu items to it, and the path of a menu item can be set to a full external url (starting with http://). The url can have a "?" as part of it, so it works with urls that need to include query parameters. However, the url is limited to 255 characters, so without some hacking, it won't work if you're trying to link to external database pages that take many long parameters. Once you've created the menu and added items to it, the jump module automatically creates a block that you can enable on the admin/build/block page.

Two potential issues you might have with this approach are:

1) You want someone to be able to enter these links without you needing to give that person administration permission to all of your menus. This can be solved by the Delegate Menu Administration module.

2) You want to add the jump menu block somewhere other than where blocks can traditionally go (i.e., left sidebar, right sidebar). There are several solutions to this problem. The panels module is the swiss army knife of layout control. For the more simple case of just wanting to place a block into a CCK field, there's the Block Reference module.

To handle the use-case of just wanting a simple CCK field where you can enter links, without needing to worry about creating menus and enabling blocks, I just posted the Link Jump module. This lets you style a multi-valued CCK link field as a drop-down with a GO button.

I hope this helps. Please reply if I misunderstood your use-case.

I have about a dozen pages that I want to have a dropdown menu of about 30 database links appear at the top of the content area. On my prior non-Drupal site, I created a dropdown list and used Javascript to take the user to the select URL. But I can't find an easy way to add this into individual pages. I would prefer not to add it as a block although that might end up being easier than some of the alternatives. I did try Link Jump, which is nice, but required me to enter all of the individual databases on every page that I wanted it to appear. That's not feasible. Any suggestions on the best way to accomplish what I want to do?