An Automatic Nodetitles PHP Snippet to automatically create titles based on taxonomy terms and date fields

So the political situation is heating up in Argentina just like Paris, France, and class struggle organizations and political parties are taking part in the current electoral process in order to focus on the struggles and issues facing the challenge of making the bosses pay for the crisis instead of the working class. So, helping out here, on a certain website I am using a content type to publicize events. The content type happens to be called “event” and happens to be used by the Event module (a long standing and ancient module created and maintained by many Drupal masters). Most of the events concern the visits of an electoral candidate to a specific physical location. So the best thing would be to have the title reflect that.

So the socially conscious webmaster justifiably got sick and tired of entering the candidate and location into taxonomy term fields, entering the date into the start date field, and then repeating all of that in the title.

Filtering Drupal Views Dynamically (or, “Leverage the big CMS and web application frameworks! Only losers start from scratch!)”

First make a dynamically filtered view on the fly like the big boys do!

Then, stick it in a panel! There are other ways of doing it, but by using this simple method you can easily:

  • List all car dealers whose monthly sales volume falls within a series of different ranges: http://example.com/dealers-that-sell-between/500/1000
  • List all jobs with salaries falling within different ranges with http://example.com/jobs-that-pay-between/100/200.

From the client’s spreadsheet data to browseable content — how to create, populate and manage your business objects in Drupal

[Note: This is a somewhat detailed description of how to leverage content types and views in Drupal, most useful for beginner to intermediate experience level in Drupal Web Application development, or to those evaluating Drupal. It is designed to show how the power of the framework is only apparent after gaining just a little experience with its features].

OMG! Dynamic jCarousel with Themed Panels 2 pane node parts!

Panels 2, the quiet revolution indeed! This tutorial will go through a series of detailed exploratory steps to achieve a dynamic jCarousel panel whose content is derived from the attached files of the node context of a panel page configured for node override. That is, the jCarousel pictured in the following image contains the thumbnails of all the images attached to the node providing the context to the shown panel page. And this is achieved by overriding theme_panels_pane(), the default theming function for individual panels in a panel page.

jQuery Validate goodness for the rest of us

OK, so I’m producing a couple of sites now that need browser side validation… And there is one of these great jQuery plugins called Validation. Now, Drupal uses jQuery, right? So, is there a contributed module out there that integrates this great little plugin? Woot! Yes there is a Santa Claus… enter jQuery plugins, looks like we’re in!

Leveraging XML-RPC services with the Services module

So back in August I was working with [[Transmitting nodes between Drupal sites]], basically using the method outlined in Chapter 19 of Pro Drupal Development.

Among the comments concerning my reinventing the wheel were several excellent suggestions, as is common in the Drupal community. One of them mentioned the Services module.

How we installed and used swftools

I know that this is documented in many places. So I just wanted to document it in one place what works today for me, so I don’t have to remember all the different places.

[Note: It has since come to our attention that an excellent guide exists in the SWFTools issues queue, which is supposed to be well worth checking out: http://drupal.org/node/181998 ]

A fresh approach to social networking profiles (Part III)

Part III – editing the profile on the one hand, displaying the profiles on the other – with jQuery tabs!

A pending issue left over from Part II