Module development and code questions

I'm thinking it's time that we catch up with Ruby on Rails in the AJAX/DHTML department. Rails has integrated the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries into their distribution and there's no reason that Drupal couldn't do the same - either as part of core or as a contrib module.

I'm thinking about building a prototype.module which will essentially be a port of the Prototype functions in Rails. Themes and other modules could call these functions and form fields to access the AJAX functions in these libraries.

I've also looked at Dojo, but right now I'm leaning toward Prototype.

I realize that Drupal has been "rolling its own" AJAX up until now, but the pace has been slow and my feeling is that we've already got our hands full with the PHP functions of Drupal. These AJAX libraries will continue to develop and thrive in parallel and we can continue to benefit from those advances.

Some features I'd love to integrate:
- sortable lists
- in-line editing
- auto-validating form fields
- animated error/info messages

Has anyone else done any work in this direction? Does anyone want to help with this effort?

Got any tips, tricks, ideas, or cautions about this? I'd love to get some feedback before I launch into this project.

Thanks!

-Jeff Robbins

I'm trying to write an authentication module, and I can't find adequate documentation. authentication.php does not give enough explanation. I found one published authentication module that I'm trying to use as an example, but it's almost completely uncommented. Where do I get information about this?

I'm working on a module, and I can't tell what's happening because it complains whenever I try to put in echo statements to see the value of things or trace execution. It doesn't seem that Drupal uses output buffers. How do I write a module when I can't see what's happening?

hello,

Just one question, how can i control the select element display mode.

I want a dropdown control and some of my select element display as scrolling selection,
even with '#multiselect' => false.

Hi,

I have been using Gallery Module for 4.6 which works fine for me. I am now trying 4.7. Anybody knows if there is work going on to port G2 module to 4.7 ? I just cant wait to get hold of it.

Similarly is the Civicspace theme ready for 4.7 yet ?

Regards

Karthik

hi all,

I am currently writing a module, which generates a form into a block. it works perfectly - form "vote" is displayed, after submitted, validated with vote_validate() and data is saved with vote_submit().

only one small problem: how can I check in the block if there is any posted data? I am using votingAPI and it requires a refresh to have a user's vote counted. so I could alternatively check for some $_POST variable. but if I try to access any $_POST variable from the block, the validating/submitting stop functioning.

any suggestions?