Notes from June Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup
Yet again, this meetup group had more things shared than I would have seen coming. I continue to be very happy that we have this group in the area for sharing experiences, best practices, horror stories and whatnot. Modules and the like shared during introductions:
- Jeff’s Handy Dandy Drupal Login Bookmarklet, bookmarklet to send you to a site’s login page and redirect back to the page you are currently on.
- Feeds Tamper provides an architecture for Feeds to modify data before it gets saved.
- Contextual layouts (different layouts/settings for various portions of a site) with the awesomesauce combination of Omega, Delta and Context.
- Quick Tabs, allows you to create blocks of tabbed content.
After introductions Al got up and showed off what Quick Tabs can do. Through a good interface you can build a block that has tabs of content that can be nodes, views, other blocks or a couple other things. Pretty neat.
Sean then talked about his experience in porting two of his 6.x modules to 7.x. He had many things to share in this space, a few pieces of which included:
- Modules should no longer explicitly install or uninstall its database schema in hook_install() or hook_uninstall()
- SimpleTest is now builtin and should be used.
- When using the Forms API, you needs to use #markup instead of #value for markup…for most cases.
- Token has changed a lot and moved into core. He also needed Entity tokens to provide tokens for entity properties that have no tokens.
Sean had plenty more to share, but he managed to tag releases for two of his modules far quicker than anticipated. For anyone working of porting be sure to peruse Converting 6.x modules to 7.x documentation. I’m also curious how much luck porters (and devs in general) are having with the Coder module.
With the excitement of how much smoother his 7.x work went than originally planned Sean also talked briefly on transitioning a D6 site to D7. While he pretty much had to redo each view all of his data has migrated with very little pain…at least for the test site he has spent ~12 hours on. He expects to have his first site upgrade pushed out in two weeks.
Vonn followed up by showing how she is using Feeds Tamper to mangle data during imports on a new site of hers. I keep forgetting to keep Feeds in mind but now I will probably use it for future projects. A note was pointed out that when dealing with Feeds you need to make sure that content types you are importing into have “Create new revision” disabled otherwise you will have a revision each time your Feeds job runs.
One of the last things shared was the Poster extension for Firefox and Chrome. Thor uses this when interacting with web services and other web resources allowing him to make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type.
The next meetup will be Thursday, July 12th, shortly followed by a play day on Saturday, July 14th. July’s meetup might have a talk or we might switch to Show and Tell meetups on odd months…we’ll see.