I thought it might be nice to do a series of module reviews, handpicking some of the more interesting modules which have been released in the last couple of months. As you might know, new Drupal modules are released daily, and while they’re often beta’s or alpha’s many of them have great potential to become very useful, and maybe you didn’t even know they exist.
Tablefield Take tablefield for example. It offers a simple, lightweight solution – though yet limited in features – to a common problem: displaying a simple table on a page. Of course there are wysiwyg editors which offer this type of functionality, but they require your client to understand how to use these more advanced options, often hidden under a right mouse-click pop-up menu.
Other alternatives would be to display an entire table-view beneath your node. But that is probably more than you need most of the time.
Depending on your needs, it might be enough when an editor could use a simple ‘wizard’ to enter some data, like a pricing sheet, which can be easily updated without having to fear you could mess up the entire layout. This is exactly what tablefield does. It offers a new cck field called ‘tableview’, which behaves like any other cck field. The options are limited to a number of columns and rows, and the first row will automatically be rendered as a header.
Biggest limitations: you can’t (yet) insert a new row or column, and while you can used filtered HTML, if you would like to put a link or image in a cell, it would require manual html input, since all cells are simple textfields. Also, since it’s a cck field, you can’t easily insert the table inline. Maybe integration with the excellent insert module could be an idea?
It’s been a while since the last Dutch Drupal meetup. The last being the Drupaljam which was in Utrecht. I guess everybody is busy with clients, projects and of course, Drupal 7, which has been released as an alpha 1 release last week.
Drupal meetup: Friday 29th of January, Utrecht
But in less than two weeks, you will be able to meet again with fellow Drupal in the Netherlands at the Utrecht International Meetup, thanks to BarisW for organising the event! Location: Belgian Beer Cafe “Olivier”. See the post for further details and signup, see you there!
(Yes I know the perspective on the pin is wrong. Let's see you make a collage! ;)
Google released a lot of goodies the last few weeks. There is the birth of Chrome OS, then we saw the launch of real-time results, and now there is Google Goggles which will probably work great on the Google Phone, to be released next year. Between all this Google also released something called Living Stories, and meanwhile almost everyone now has received a Google Wave invite.
It does make you wonder a bit where all this is going…
Still, it *is* cool technology for the mobile web (which is the future). It’s exclusively available for Android, so I whopped out my HTC Hero to search for it on the market. However, I forget to read the fine print: Google Googles is only available for Android 1.6+ and my 4 months old Hero is still stuk on 1.4. HTC should have an update to 2.0 (or even 2.1) ready anytime now, if the rumours are true (skipping 1.6 all together)
In the meanwhile, you can also take a look at this short video to get an idea.
Google Goggles reminds me of Layar – but after looking a bit closer, it is a bit different. In addition to GPS and compass information, Goggles also has visual recognition software to detect your surroundings or object. It still in its infancy but looks very promising. Is it just a matter of time before Google buyes Layar to add the augmented reality (OpenGL) 3D environment to Goggles?
There are various analytic tools available to gain insight in your sites’ statistics. These are mostly tools like Clicky, Google Analytics or Crazy Egg and only give you information about your visitors.
There are often times when you need to know what is happening within your content management system itself. Especially if you are running a dynamic community website with lots of user activity. How is my content devided and which content-types are popular? How many users do I have which never log in? And a lot of other questions.
Most of the time, these are internal Drupal statistics, and while you can get some of these things to work with third party services (like role segregation in Google Analytics), not everything can be accessed by these tools.
For Drupal, there is an alternative called the Report module. Still an alpha at this point, but it delivers some great info in addition to the core statistics module. The beauty of this module is the way it works together with the Chart API module to generate nice charts and diagrams. Like in the example above.
Last week, Google introduced a new feature: site hierarchy – or site navigation “breadcrumbs” – with selected search results. You may have noticed this yourself. The green line marked in the picture beneath is now being used to show you where the specific result is located on the site related to its structure.
I think this is pretty sweet behaviour which often gives a lot more useful information then the url path which was displayed before. Often, in many (drupal) site, the structure of the site and its url paths is something which is overlooked and is generated without any context information. For drupal this defaults to /node/##. See also the example above.
Google loves Drupal breadcrumbs
And now for the great part: Drupal out of the box generates breadcrumbs and displays them in the default templates. Google recognizes this navigational links and uses them in their SERP as seen above. Great! You get some free SEO. That is, IF you use drupal breadcrumbs in your template. In my opinion, this functionality is often overlooked by designers, and is often missing in wireframes.
Granted, it’s not necessary for every website , but I think this new feature might give the old breadcrumb a new boost in designs.
Related breadcrumb modules for Drupal In case you were looking, here are some modules to further customize your breadcrumbs in Drupal.
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