Drupal 7

Every small finding is worth sharing. This blog post is no except for this fact. Drupal ships with a module for blogging since a long time. This mighty module offers a potential multi-user blogging feature to Drupal site. This is an essential module for most of the contents publishing site. Blog content has been architectured to leverage node. A new blog can be created by any user with permission "Blog entry: Create new content" as of Drupal 7.

Rules no novel to Drupal area, are always considered as the unsophisticated way to accomplish action. A paradigm of rule's dominance can be witnessed in sending a mail after a user account creation, Blocking a Specific user from accessing the site, Providing access to products in Drupal Commerce, etc. Rules can be created either programmatically or by using piece of code.

Introduction:

At KnackForge we often see requirement to expose custom fields to views for better integration with Drupal flow. In this article we are going to see steps to expose a custom field from a custom table. Infact its a virtual field. 

Use case:

Assume you have two custom fields total_marks and marks_obtained in a custom table. Now you need to calculate the percentage of mark scored. You don't need a field in table for this. You can create a virtual field bound to marks_obtained field.

Pager: no new to the dictionary of Web, plays an important role in reducing long scrolling and improvises the visual look of the site. One of the pages in my site lists statistics based details. It wasn't that appealing to go ahead with this page which had almost 100 plus items to display. At this point I had a sudden idea to split the statistics with the help of pager.

Search plays a crucial role in content driven websites. Drupal and the Open source enterprise search platform Solr form a effective combination. Drupal 7 has apachesolr module which  integrates Drupal with the Apache Solr search platform. I am going to detail on how to alter the solr query to get better and precise results.

Lightbox a powerful module in Drupal arena., proved its mastery once again! I was involved in trying to find a way to display nodes in popup, the apparent module that struck my way was Colorbox-Node. Things looked as if it would be a cake-walk but went beyond what I thought. The Colorbox-Node holds the ability to display nodes in overlay effect, but it needs huge template and jQuery level customization.

At many times Drupal Architects prefer to go with Apache Solr instead of Drupal core search. I am no outlander to this scenario, but this time it was a new requirement. By default the Apache Solr relies on Jetty server to index and retrive items during the search. My need was to use Tomcat server in the place of Jetty. The first glance proved it was an easy task, but latter the tough fight started.