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Modules of the Month: January 2013 (Better late than never)

3 March 2013
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

Well, February is always a short month, but this year it seemed like it passed in just a couple of weeks… and now it’s already March and I’m only finally getting around to putting the final touches on this posting for the January “Modules of the Month”. How did that happen? Well, I won’t try to bore you or make excuses. It’s just been one of those months. I’m going to try to keep up my current momentum and evaluate and write up my favorites from February now… hopefully finishing that in the next week or so. If it’s not done by the 15th, it won’t be done till April since I’ll be taking off for my first trip to India in the middle of this month.

But I’m not here to write about myself. This is about some modules which I found might be worthy of notice… specifically those released in January 2013. It’s interesting to see the evolution of a Drupal version and what kinds of modules are being released these days. Almost no modules are being released for Drupal 6 and Drupal 8’s developer API is still far enough from maturity that there are very few modules being released for it, so almost all the focus is on Drupal 7. Almost anything really critical has already been done, so most modules now fit into areas of workflow improvement, integration of third-party libraries, developer tools, and addressing the needs of an increasingly mobile audience (responsive design). There are a lot of new modules for image display, for keeping a closer eye on site administration issues, creating better e-shops, deploying content from one site to another, and managing caching, among other trends. It’s clear that Drupal 7 is a mature product serving the needs of an extremely diverse community and it’s exciting to see all the new ways that, each month, developers encounter new needs and find inventive ways to further extend on the feature-set. So read on to see what new and fun stuff we got in January… (and I promise to try to get February’s review done in the next week or so).

Our First W3C TPAC & Our Mission to standardize the Multilingual Web

7 January 2013

Inspiring conversations with Tim Berners Lee, a nice chat with Mike Smith – W3C member Cocomore was at the 2012 W3C TPAC in Lyon, France. The W3C Combined Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week, or TPAC, brings together W3C Groups, the Advisory Board, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and the Advisory Committee for coordinated work and exciting sessions about current W3C topics.

Modules of the Month: Shiny new Drupal modules from December 2012

2 January 2013
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

Closing out the year 2012 with a bang, December brought us quite a number of new modules which look promising enough to cover; a few that I’m covering this time are far from ready or even only at the “concept” stage and normally would not be included, but they seemed particularly interesting or unique, and I want to see how they develop. Anyway, this month there were quite a few modules released for mobile support/responsive content. There were also several search-related modules, anti-spam modules, a couple of novelty modules, some interesting commerce-related releases, a number of Features package modules customized for various special-purpose distributions, lots of new “Third-party Integration” modules, theme enhancements, and more… I only wish I had more time so I could actually try out more of them, but there are several I do plan to get back to.

As usual, this post is sorted alphabetically and only covers modules which had their first release, or at least a new project created, in December. Selection for the Modules of the Month is a completely arbitrary process, but normally excludes common or niche items like a new payment method for Commerce that provides connections for a payment system used in, e.g. Romania. We also don’t normally include commercial service integration modules (unless the service looks really cool and is reasonably priced).

Anyway, it seems like only last week that I was putting the final touches on the November “Modules of the Month” story… oh wait, it was only last week: nine days ago, as I write this. Well I promised to try to get December’s published in early January, so I pushed some days around to make this happen. Let’s take a look at the modules, then, shall we? …

Modules of the Month: Most promising modules from October

23 November 2012
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

October 2012 brought us a nice batch of interesting new modules. Of course I wanted to tell you all about them weeks ago, but without going into excuses and details, I’m afraid getting this published didn’t go as planned. I’d like to get back on schedule to release the next installation of this series in early December, though. Anyway, it’s great to see all of the innovations that have been introduced in the past month. You can tell that Drupal 7 has truly reached maturity by the kind of modules that are being released now. Many, if not most, of the new modules integrate with and extend the functionality of other contributed modules—for example, there are three new modules which provide plugins for the Facet API—or integrate exciting new jQuery plugins to bring a bit of sizzle to your site.

As usual, the list is in alphabetical order and I haven’t tried all of these modules (although I have experimented with quite a few of them and even eliminated a few from consideration since they seemed a bit too “broken” at this point.) Some of these modules might not be ready for use yet, but just show good promise and look worth keeping an eye on. Creating this monthly list is as much for me as it is for you, but I do hope that the modules I select work well for you, if you give them a try, and I look forward to seeing your comments about any of these modules.

Better than WYSIWYG? The BUEditor in Drupal 7: Use and Configuration

28 October 2011

Some time back, I promised another short article in the WYSIWYG set-up series for Drupal 7, one which covers BUEditor. First, we should note that the BUEditor is not actually “WYSIWYG”, but it offers some nice features which might make it a bit better than the WYSIWYG options, depending on your use case. It also does not integrate with the Wysiwyg module. You add it separately (and instead of Wysiwyg), but it does have some great supporting modules and code libraries. This article covers some of the basics about use and installation of the BUEditor on a Drupal 7 site (most of the information applies equally to Drupal 6, where the BUEditor module is also available). I’ve also got some good tips for some ways to extend the default button-set. (And you can download my modified button code here to easily import the buttons into a new editor profile.)

Configuring and adding images to Drupal 7 content with Wysiwyg, IMCE and Lightbox2

6 October 2011

This article covers the configuration and use of IMCE (and related modules) to integrate uploading and inserting images within your Drupal content. We assume you are using either TinyMCE or CKEditor with the Wysiwyg integration module, but in a separate post we will cover using IMCE with the BUEditor, a simpler text editor which also works well with Drupal. Note: This article uses Drupal 7, but most of the tips should also be helpful if you are configuring a Drupal 6 site for the same functionality. Indeed, this site is still running on Drupal 6 and also uses a Wysiwyg-integrated CKEditor, IMCE, the Image resize filter, and Lightbox2.

Configure an awesome WYSIWYG content editor in Drupal 7 with TinyMCE or CKEditor

18 September 2011

In Drupal, there are actually a number of ways to add a WYSIWYG editor to a text area. The new “Drupal way”, used on over 150,000 Drupal sites and arguably not so “new” anymore, is to use the Wysiwyg integration module, which has support for several of the editor libraries. I would personally suggest using it, if your needs can be met by it, since it's becoming more and more powerful and offers a fair bit of flexibility to easily change the configuration or editor used. That said, there may still be reason, in Drupal 7, to use one of the single-library integration modules, such as the still-popular CKEditor project. The TinyMCE integration module development has already been abandoned in favor of Wysiwyg, but it's good to have alternatives. Note: In this post, we assume you already know your way around Text formats. Text format configuration can be one of the most tricky parts of properly setting up your WYSIWYG experience, so if you don't already feel you know your way around this common stumbling block, be sure to read our recent post about Text formats / Text filters, too. This article is a companion-post to that one, but it also includes some degree of overlap, since when we turn on the Lightbox and Image Resize Filter modules, we have new filters we'll want to use in some text formats and we will want to pay attention to the order in which they are applied, so we will briefly revisit this topic here.