BuyBlue.org re-launches using upcoming Drupal 4.7 codebase

We used two taxonomy vocabularies for that view, one for the rating category (e.g. labor & human rights) and one for positive/negative.

The rest of what you see is code we included in the .tpl files for the theme. Based on the Term ID and the mathematical percentage of positive vs. negative articles we grab a specific image to use.

For company forums, the code simply creates a forum for each company using the title field. We modified the forum template file to hide company forums from our main forum so it wouldn't get too busy.

The tabs are also handled by the theme by running certain code depending on the arguments passed which in turn renders different pages.

We'll definitely be contributing the stock API for others to use and expand on. I'm not sure what timeline Matt has in mind for that though, perhaps he can comment on that here. I know he is pretty busy these days :)

The short answer is that we plan to use the eCommerce module in the future for the store. The reason why we didn't do that in this release is because the store is run by a third party vendor so we have to be sensitive to contractual issues and their resources. Implementing an eCommerce solution is also a fairly big project in and of itself, even with the excellent module :)

But, we do plan to use the eCommerce module in the future for the store and also for paid memberships to (as yet undeveloped) premium content. We also plan to use it for online donations (currently hosted by a third party).

Aside from the work involved in implementing that solution we'll have to decide if we want to take on the responsibility of dealing with credit card transactions, getting products shipped, etc.

The good thing is that we have a robust and proven module ready to go so we don't have to worry about developing something.

The mailing list is definitely an area for improvement on my list. We are using a product called 1-2-all email marketing for our mailing list and there is no contributed module integrating this into Drupal at the moment. 1-2-all isn't a free product, but it is priced pretty reasonably.

We struggled quite a bit with the mailing list problem. The options which nicely integrated with drupal are phpList and ezmlm. We felt that ezmlm was a little bit too technical for the general user population. Our users range from internet experts to casual surfers that know how to check email and browse and that's it.

I've used phpList before and as an open source product it is great, but it had some deficiencies around your ability to send "professional" mailings and stability for high volume mailings. Just sending out 5k or 10k emails seemed to take forever, now I can send 30K in about 30 minutes. When we first started we were using phpList for our mailing list and later converted to 1-2-all. The biggest problem in my opinion is the fact that the Drupal integrated version is even more scaled down than the stand-alone and there is no way to allow anonymous users to subscribe, people have to register at the site (as you have noticed in your investigation). I'm not sure if this has since changed, I was evaluating it several months ago. For us, not allowing anonymous users to sign up would be a big problem because not everyone would want to create a user. We probably could have modified the contributed module but we wanted to make as much use of contributed modules as possible and concentrate on custom modules with our time and money.

So we evaluated several mailing products and decided on 1-2-all several months ago because of some of the outstanding features combined with a reasonable price. I've been very happy with it so far and it has handled high volume mailings gracefully.

As far as the integration with Drupal we just have it in a block right now, the product generates a subscription form for you based on what fields you want to track and posts the results to its database. You can configure what URLs you want to appear for your success, error, subscribe, unsubscribe pages, etc so we simply created pages in drupal for those and the app redirects you to them.

The one thing that I really need to do is give registered users the option of subscribing or unsubscribing when they register or edit their profile. This shouldn't be hard to do I just haven't had time yet. I don't know what interest there would be from the community in using this product (since it costs money to use) but I could look at contributing a module to do this integration.

We use menu items as Matt stated in his post and some heavy lifting by the theme .tpl file for company nodes.

The menu section (in part) looks like this:

      foreach ($sections as $path => $title) {
        $items[] = array('path' => 'node/'. arg(1). '/view/'. $path, 'title' => $title,
          'access' => node_access('view', $node), 'type' => MENU_LOCAL_TASK,
          'weight' => $i);
        $i++;
      }

$sections is an array containing the names of the various tabs, the rest is stanard node stuff.

A company is a custom node type and utilizes the main node table but most of the data resides in custom tables. The .tpl file uses a case statement to determine what should be rendered for each $section of the menu (e.g. summary, information, etc). The theme then grabs the elements it needs and displays them.

That is the high level explanation of it.

Its part of the core in 4.7 :)
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BuyBlue.org

That's the footer, a standard part of the core settings and invoked by your theme.

You get to it through admin -> settings -> general settings. Type whatever you want in the "footer message" box.

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BuyBlue.org

That's pretty sweet! I'd be happy to try and answer what I can for people trying to emulate what the site is doing. We're also working on a bunch of really awesome stuff this year (a lot of which we are sponsoring and contributing back such as extensive development of OG and some other modules). We've also just about got everything converted to the new forms api so we can re-launch on the current codebase.

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BuyBlue.org

Not sure that I can help out with that, I don't have a good understanding of the underlying code for those modules. I'd suggest filing a bug or a support request under those modules or creating a general forum topic on the subject as your quickest path to resolution.

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BuyBlue.org