katbailey.net

At last I overcame my fear of Views 2.0 and have added it to my D6 effort for Quick Tabs. (Previously my D6 version only allowed you to add blocks to your tabs.) My colleague, Hubert a.k.a. couzinhub, having quickly jumped in and familiarised himself with the wonders of Views 2.0 (well, after all he did help with the UI), helped me out with a very enthusiastic run-though of displays, overriding default displays, etc. and generally getting an overview of the lay of the land in the beta4 release of this super-module.

As far as Quick Tabs integration went, all I needed was a way of providing a drop-down list of all available Views so that people could add one for display in a tab. I had previously used the views_build_view() function then to display the view. There were a couple of hiccups in getting this to work in Drupal 6. Views_build_view() no longer exists but there is views_embed_view() which is slightly different because of the fact that you now have different displays per View. Probably the biggest challenge was getting a dependent drop-down to show all the displays for whichever View is selected. Let's just say I had an interesting journey through the Forms API, after my initial naïve effort that simply used AJAX to replace the options in the drop-down (synopsis: you can't add new elements or even select options to Drupal forms via AJAX without telling Drupal about them - see here for more info: http://drupal.org/node/150859). And the end result is a Quick Tabs creation form which may well get the prize for highest concentration of AJAX and AHAH craziness - which is not necessarily a good thing, as I'm worried my issue queue will prove soon enough.

Actually, the real low point came after I had done the bulk of the work and then suddenly it seemed that the new Views was so powerful it totally reduced the benefit of being able to add a View directly into a Quick Tabs block over just adding that View's block display (i.e. just adding a block that happens to come from a View). Well, fortunately, that's not quite true. The ability to use the same View in multiple tabs but passing in different arguments each time (an example of which is the "My Favourite..." QT block in my right sidebar) is, I think, justification enough for my continuing to include Views integration in Quick Tabs. I'm looking forward to feedback on this question.

Next on my to-do list: SimpleTest unit tests for Quick Tabs. And I might even request some Drupal Tough Love for it... if I dare!

[Cross-posting from the Raincity blog]

I've submitted a proposal to the DrupalCon Szeged site for a tutorial session on jQuery in Drupal. I'd reallly like to get two co-presenters on board to structure it into three 30-minute tutorials, each covering two or three of the following suggested topics:

• how jQuery and Drupal relate to each other
• keeping up with jQuery versions
• the Drupal js object
• how behaviors are handled in Drupal 6
• AJAXifying Drupal with jQuery
• debugging JavaScript with Firebug
• AHAH and Drag&Drop

The topics I'd personally like to cover are i) keeping up with jQuery versions and ii) the Drupal js object. Maybe debugging as well. I'm totally open to suggestions regarding specific topics; the aim is that we will provide a really well-rounded, instructive and comprehensive session on using jQuery in Drupal in 90 minutes.

So, if you are heading to DrupalCon Szeged, haven't decided on what, if any, sessions to present, and feel comfortable with and interested in the above topics, please get in touch with me via my contact form.

Alternatively, if you're not planning on presenting but would be interested in attending such a session, I'd love to hear your feedback as to the content so please leave your comments.

I just posted Part Two of a fairly lengthy discussion of jQuery in Drupal over on the Raincity Studios website. Check out both installments:
The Lowdown on jQuery - Part One
The Lowdown on jQuery - Part Two

Drupal Camp Vancouver '08 was a roaring success and I enjoyed it enormously. There was a really interesting crowd at the event, with people from Seattle, Victoria, even as far away as Saskatoon and parts of Alberta. It was an amazing opportunity for networking and just getting to know more of the local (and obviously not-so-local) Drupal scene. My colleague Steve Krueger and I were delighted at the level of interest shown in our jQuery talks (we had to get moved to the big room because we couldn't all fit in our originally allocated space :-)). But then jQuery does somehow have that effect, probably because it's just so damn cool - and so putting it and Drupal together is a recipe for "sweet love" in the realm of code.

My presentation slides are below. Oh, and here's the link to the AJAX demo: http://www.katbailey.net/demo/node/56

| View | Upload your own

In March I attended my first DrupalCon and next weekend I will experience my first Drupal Camp - right here in Vancouver. OK, so it won't be quite the grand affair that DrupalCon Boston was, but there are lots of interesting talks lined up and it will be great to meet more of the local Drupalers. Some of the sessions that have caught my eye so far include "Building Community with Organic Groups", "Intro to Panels 2" and the session on the Forms API.

I'll be giving a talk on using jQuery with Drupal, aimed primarily at module developers, providing an overview of how the two fit together and discussing some tools and best practices.

Full details of Drupal Camp Vancouver can be found at http://drupalcampvancouver.org/

I've been working with Marco Carbone of Advomatic on a powerful content scheduling module. Marco originally built Slot Machine for FastCompany.com and it proved such a powerful tool for organising content display it was obvious that contributing it to the community was the next step. As its name suggests, the module allows you to 'slot' content into different queues according to topics, which come from a particular vocabulary, and define the update frequency for each slot in each topic. So, for example, you could have an 'Entertainment' page with a 'Latest Buzz' slot that updates every 4 hours, a 'Daily Image' slot that updates daily at 6am, a 'Latest Video' slot that updates every two days, etc... And then you could have a 'Technology' page with the same slots but different frequencies (maybe the technology 'buzz' isn't quite as fast and furious as celebrity scandals and the like...) Anyway, you get the picture.

So at Raincity I've been working on generalising this wonderful functionality into something that can be used on any D5 site - removing dependencies on other modules, adding an admin interface for creating your own feature types etc., and adding a simple system for displaying the slotted content. One of the more difficult tasks has been the generalisation of a feature which allows content to automatically get bumped down to a lower priority slot after it is removed from its original slot. Originally the slots in question were hard-coded into the module and so converting that into a scenario where you're saying "Let any content type that can reside in more than one slot rotate along them in order of priority" has been a challenge. But I think we're nearly there.

Anyway, it has been a great learning experience for me to work on this (thanks to NextScreen for sponsoring the work) and I look forward to us getting the first release out. Here's the project page:
http://drupal.org/project/slot_machine

I gave an introductory presentation on jQuery to the Vancouver League of Drupallers the week before DrupalCon Boston. It covered the basics of the jQuery framework and an explanation of how to use it in Drupal. Here is the slideshare of the presentation:

| View | Upload your own

But of course at DrupalCon I was bombarded with new ideas about using jQuery, especially in Drupal 6. One of the main to-dos on my list since returning from Boston is to get up to speed on things like Drag and Drop, AHAH, the jQuery UI plugin in general and all the new ways that jQuery is being implemented in contrib modules. And who knows... maybe a jQuery presentation Part 2 will come of it...

I finally got over my "just one more tweak..." attempt at perfectionism and decided to release quicktabs properly. Yes, there are still features that need to be added, in particular better editing flexibility for existing quicktabs blocks. But the main functionality is there and there don't seem to be any serious bugs. And people want it! So here it is: http://drupal.org/project/quicktabs

And the blurb from the project page, in case you don't want to go there just now, that explains what it does:

The Quick Tabs module allows you to create blocks of tabbed content, specifically views and blocks. You can create a block on your site containing up to six tabs with corresponding content. Clicking on the tabs makes the corresponding content display instantly (it uses jQuery). The content for each tabbed section can be either a view or an existing block. It is an ideal way to do something like the Most Popular / Most Emailed stories tabs you see on many news websites.

Once created, the Quick Tabs blocks show up in your block listing, ready to be configured and enabled like other blocks.

Multiple Quick Tabs blocks can be placed on a single page.

For theming of the tabs, 9 styles have been provided for you to choose from, along with the default option of no style, if you prefer to add your own theming instead.