News and announcements

I made a tag file for Drupal CMS ver. 6.14 with all available core functions. It works well with my Geany 0.18. You can download it from the Geany website: http://www.geany.org/Download/Extras
Enjoy!

UPDATE: project is now hosted at http://code.google.com/p/drupal-shift-scheduler/

I've been working on a very small/simple module to manage a duty schedule for a small collegiate emergency medical services provider, and I am posting to see if it's worth my time to expand it into a more general shift scheduler for employees/volunteers.

The workflow for my module is something like this:
* An administrator uses the "Create Days" page to create a bunch of open shifts that need to be filled by employees/volunteers at standard times.
* The admin then goes to the schedule, and fills in the names of the volunteers (selected from a list of drupal users) to fill each shift. (Slots can also be split between two different volunteers.)
* Volunteers can then access and look at the schedule at any time. By default, only present and future shifts are shown, but there is an option to look at the schedule starting from any arbitrary point in history.
* Anyone can look at a list of the previous shifts taken by any volunteer in a given date range.

Screenshots that roughly follow that workflow are below:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/652502/duty%20schedule/public_schedule.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/652502/duty%20schedule/add_days.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/652502/duty%20schedule/admin_schedule.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/652502/duty%20schedule/change_shift.png

Hello,

Two months ago, a case study about the migration of France 24 from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 was posted on drupal.org frontpage, and it was announced some really interesting modules were going to be open sourced.

I'm happy to say it is (almost?) finished, and here is the list of modules:

• Multimedia Element: It allows you to create blocks (not drupal blocks) containing stories (inserted manually, automatically, semi-automatically with Easy View), carousels of stories, text, photos, diaporamas (including lightbox diapos), video, twitter, table, ... And you can embed these blocks directly into your story with a nifty FckEditor plugin. Here is a nice example of story with a carousel, a diaporama and a video multimedia element.
• Easy View: Easy View is a very easy and powerful interface framework to Views, in a CCK field. It also include Easy View Taxonomy, the easy view implementation of the taxonomy View. It basically allows a simple user to configure a View per node without using the complex View UI.

Over the summer JWA funded work to create an OAI-ORE reader/presentation tool using a Drupal website. The work was done by the amazing folks at Linnovate, who were a pleasure to work with. The tools use flash (flex?) for the presentation, and save the presentations in the Atom-compatible OAI-ORE format. The work revolves around nodequeue, and prompted some new features added to that and related modules. The idea is that the various media objects on our website (or on any other website with these modules installed) can be remixed by educators (who are also able to upload their own "media objects") in creating presentations. We're working on our own public reference, now in beta, which we hope to release to educators in the Spring. The documentation of that should make all of the pieces make more sense.

In the meantime, since the modules are available at drupal.org, we have finally uploaded the initial implementation notes in a form that may enable other people to look at these tools and play with/develop them further. See http://jwa.org/technology/unlock for tech details, or http://jwa.org/aboutjwa/programs/unlock about the "unlocking the archive" project for which this open source software was developed.

The modules involved include:

Drupal Website Models by Tee Publishing http://www.websesame.com/node/139 is an ideas book for web application users and builders. The book illustrates how to use the Drupal framework to build highly effective web projects. Drupal Website Models identifies the popular web architectures and the business models behind them and illustrates how these may be implemented with the Drupal web development framework.

Drupal Website Models is for the Drupal user, developer, and IT manager. The book is not technical; it is more of a project planning tool to determine how it is possible to make Drupal work for specific project types. In the major chapters, the book identifies the popular web architecture models as well as the business models commonly applied in each case and illustrates how they are implemented in the Drupal framework. The book suggests the essential add-ons that can make implementation of each project category easy. Drupal Website Models follows up with examples of live websites in each category, including screenshots of the model.

This book is aimed at students , hobbyists and business owners who would like to test the Drupal platform and to see if it meets their immediate and future business needs for a Web application.
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Book can be purchased from Tee Publishing http://www.websesame.com/node/139

Chapter Headings:

My publishers, Packt, have provided me with three new Drupal related books to review. Today, I'm reviewing the first of these books, Drupal 6 Content Administration by J. Ayen Green.