sirkitree.net //say it out loud, [sur-ki-tree]

I got the chance to help out with the Drupal.org redesign sprint Friday and Saturday afternoon at the Chapter 3 offices in San Francisco. I mainly helped out with the Dashboard project, creating the functionality of being able to move dashboard gadgets from one page to another by dragging them onto the various tabs across the top.

Have you ever needed to export users into a csv file from Drupal? Working in corporate environments, I've had to do this many a time, and it's usually a PITA. However, the new Views Bulk Operations (or VBO) just made that job much, much easier.

VBO is an awesome style plugin for Views 2 that can turn pretty much any view into an administrative interface for bulk operations by allowing you to apply system actions and hook_[user/node/comment]_operations() to whatever your view displays. You can read more about it on the project page; I'm just here to tell you about how I used it to make a common task a lot easier.

Yesterday I hosted a BoF session on Activity. We went over what is currently available in the D6.x-1-1 release as well as the different approaches taken between the 6.x-1.x and 6.x-2.x branches. The 2.x branch is a refocus on core integration, extendability through more hooks, and efficiency of recording and displaying messages.

1.x vs 2.x

• Recording

  1.x - uses it's own functions

  2.x - uses an extendable*, configurable action

In Dries' keynote speech this year, one of the things he talked about was having some sort of Activity log for Drupal. I've worked for a while on a module called just that, Activity, and I think it's conception was originally based around what Dries was referring to; logs of activity of what users are doing on a Drupal site.

First off, when I talk about popups, I'm NOT talking about popup ads, or popup browser windows, but rather modal windows within the canvas. Techniques like lightbox, greybox, and jQuery UI's Dialog. These give us 'application-like' modal windows within the browser, completely provided by javascript, in order to give our users elegant views of content, sometimes through Ajax.

There's a new system for creating buddy lists on your site. It's light weight and dependent upon Flag module. It's called Flag Friend.

While there are already a couple of modules out there that provide a user relationship or buddy list functionality, I was tasked to come up with a bare minimum system that utilized our current setup without adding a lot of overhead. I had already replaced Views Bookmark and Flag Content with Flag module on our platform and there had already been mention of the concept of reciprocity for flags to come up with a way to create an authorized relationship system using Flag module's API, so I dove in.

Have you ever found yourself following development releases of Drupal modules much more closely, but never able to quite keep up with all of the modules you're following? Have you ever wished that you could get notified when something changed; a patch committed, a new feature committed, and email just isn't fast enough for you? ... do you twitter? Then I've got the solution for you!

My buddy Dave Burns just did a comprehensive review of 7 WYSIWYG editors on his blog, check 'em out!

Drupal 5 : Review of the best WYSIWYG editors

Jump to Review

• BU Editor
• HTMLBox
• nicEdit
• OpenWYSIWYG
• YUI Rich Text Editor
• HTMLArea
• tinyMCE

Not sure if anyone follows my personal blog @jeradbitner.com ... but thought I would let you know what I'm up to these days. I moved to San Francisco and am currently working for ParentsClick Network with the talented Ted Serbinski and Scott Reynolds. no sooner did I get here and they announced this:

For those interested, nodecomment.module has been getting some porting attention. The DRUPAL-6--1 branch has been created and a development snapshot should be available soon. Please give it a try if you're interested and give some feedback.