module development

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As some of you know, I've recently taken over maintenance of Inline and Image Assist, and initiated the Wysiwyg project. That was not only caused by personal interest, but also to take the necessary steps to realize the long awaited Inline API. You might ask yourself, what those three modules have in common or to do with each other at all: They deal with user input, allow to embed complex contents into a content, and provide an interactive GUI for that. If you already had the chance to work with them, you already know that there is a rather hidden, non-obvious hard-dependency between them.

Although I'd really like to discuss both topics (Inline and Wysiwyg support) separately, the gained experience on these topics enforces us to discuss them concurrently. The following mockup hopefully explains why: (see attachment to view in full size)

In case you don't know, Edward Z. Yang (ezyang) is squashing a lot of bugs in coder_format in the scope of a GHOP task currently.
In case you don't know coder_format, it's a script I wrote some time ago which re-formats one PHP file, or recursively all files in a directory according to Drupal's Coding Standards. Doug Green has been so kind to add it to the Coder module, so if you are a Drupal developer, you probably have (an out-dated version of) it already. Unfortunately, it did not receive that much attention yet.

I do not yet want to promote coder_format with this post. Today, I just want to show you the results of an experiment, which in turn will show you, what you can expect from coder_format.

Guess, what this ugly code snippet is:

I just built my first module today. It is inanely simple, but it works. I created two fields that the user fills in, and using the values from those fields I made it do a simple calculation. Now I'm trying to figure out how to take the results from those calculations and control the output a bit more. The only way that I have found to print the results from a form in drupal is with drupal_print_message. This works for single result equations, but later I need to be able to end up with multiple results and do more advanced formatting with tables or unordered list.

Hello Oregonians,

Just wanted to make sure everyone knows about the upcoming Lullabot workshops happening in Portland next month. The team will be in town from January 7th - 11th teaching Intro to Drupal Development and Advanced API and Module Development. You can sign up for either workshop individually or attend the whole week at a discount.

I hope we get to meet some of you while we're in town!

If one wants to have multiple multi-page articles on a site, one seems to be really limited right now. Especially if one wants to have the nodes in an ordered tree and wants to be able to insert new nodes anywhere in that tree and also wants to be able to move nodes from one position to another.

So far I am using node_relativity which allows me to put nodes in a tree, but that tree is only ordered by the nodes id. I also had to heavily modify the output of the module as I need to output a table of contents of the article.

To get this group kick started, I thought I would post my own recent idea for a new module. It’s still in the proposal stage and has no code, but early feedback will definitely help its development…

If anyone was not interested in Facebook development before, this should whet their appetite somewhat...

http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=90d7839c3df03d3858171b361584dc3chttp://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=90d7839c3df03d3858171b361584dc3c

Get coding! :)

Edit: That link is dead now, this one is better: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/a0txcUgfYeSXm5/Facebook-to-Offer-Big...

There are a "LOT" of contrib modules out there. Even more so, there are a great deal of good modules that have been neglected. Lets be honest, a developers time is precious, and we all get spread thin and a bit scattered sometimes, and we leave our children (modules) to the way side for other things (like "bill-paying" modules/development so we can eat from time to time :) ).

I have E-Commerce 5.x-3.0 running in Drupal 5.1 where I have projects setup where people can donate toward the projects I have setup with target 'goal' prices, but I need the ability for them to either:

a) have a field in the checkout where they can designate what component of the project they want to donate towards
b) utilize the subproduct module to allow users to literally pick a component of the project and add it to the shopping cart

I tried doing this with the existing subproduct module, but it is uniquely designed to interact with physical products such as apparel.

After reading Hariska2@drupal.org's comment about creating a rudimentary DMS module, I was thinking about wanting just such a thing. (It is part of the reason for establishing this group.)

However, much of the functionality already exists. I want to make sure that if I aid in the creation of a new module for document management that that module doesn't totally overlap existing functionality to much. However, there are some pretty significant improvements that I think could be made. I will commence with suggesting the things that already exist and then consider what is missing.