POE-com - Product Options E-commerce A product configuration shopping cart application built for Joomla 2.5+. Features: - Complex Product Configurations - Staged and Static Product Pages - Build in Page Tabs and Product Detail Links - Multiple Pricing Models (qty,area,volume,level) - Selection controlled by Option Constraints - Silent User Registration - RFQ (Request for Quote) Handling - Payment API Suite - Shipping API Suite - GEO Location Handling - Built to be Extensible on Joomla MVC architecture

The DrupalCon Munich team was excited about the interest for this year's scholarship award, with 57 applications submitted. The DrupalCon scholarship program allows Drupal Community members, who would otherwise not be able to attend DrupalCon, to benefit from the DrupalCon experience as the Drupal Community benefits from each scholar's attendance.

The scholarship committee has made the final selection, and we are proud to present these deserving Drupalistas with Scholarships. Scholarships give access persons who would like to attend DrupalCon but lack financial resources to do so. The following awardees will be attending this year's conference in Munich, where the theme will be 'Open Up! Connecting systems and people’.

Scholarship Recipients*:

• Greg Dunlap
• Cathleen Theys
• Jeremy Thorson
• Yves Chedemois
• Thomas Svenson
• Karyn Cassio
• Capi Etheriel
• Jessica M.
• Wolfgang Ziegler

*We will add more recipients to this list as we confirm.

We would like to thank everyone who applied for a scholarship, and congratulate those of you who were selected.

Scholarships

In creating the mobile application for the Chicago DrupalCon, our team learned quite a few things about iOS/Android Drupal-based mobile app development. This article will distill a couple of hundred hours of our work into a few lessons you can use on your next Drupal-based mobile application.

Assemble a Good Team

One thing we realized early on was that if we wanted this project to be a success we were going to need to treat it like a proper project. Proper meant actually bringing on a UX person to make sure the app made sense. It also meant that it should have a backend engineer and a front end developer.

Our engineer for the backend was Larry Garfield (known as Crell in the Drupal world), our UX person was Jen Simmons, and I brought up the front-end development side of things.

Outline Your Requirements

After determining our resources, we outlined our requirements and their importance. We found it helpful to break this down into three categories; must do, important but not critical, and nice to have.

For our project, the list of application requirements went like this:

Author Patrick Teglia

Pat is an experienced Drupal front-end developer and mobile app enthusiast currently working for Palantir.net as a Senior Developer, building wicked cool things such as the DrupalCon mobile app.

Views are a massive part of Drupal and you can't experience the power of Drupal without the Views module.

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In lieu of the fact that I was unable to go attend Confab this week, I wanted to represent the Content Strategy movement by sharing a notion I've been thinking about for quite some time. I believe there are three key ingredients to making an amazing website: 

1. Beautiful Design
2. Meaningful Content
3. Rock Solid Development

While this concept may seem self evident, I find most web projects do a great job at focusing on design and development, but fail to allocate sufficient resources, time, and consideration to the "Meaningful Content" chunk of the triangle. 

Fortunately, the evolving field of Content Strategy has produced a concepts, tools, and methodologies which have begun to shift people's opinions on the importance of this sector.

In an effort to support this momentum, I've compiled a list of resources to share with future collaborators, web practitioners, and site administrators. 

After all, the more we all know about Content Strategy, the better the web will become.

Hash tags to follow

• #contentstrategy (my personal favorite)
• #confab2012

People to follow

• @halvorson
• @karenmcgrane
• @arockley
• @RellyAB
• @confab2012

Books to read

• Content Strategy for the Web
• The Elements of Content Strategy
• Content Rules

Resources to check out

• http://blog.braintraffic.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/content-strategy-storytelling/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/03/content-strategy-optimizing-y...
• http://www.slideshare.net/KMcGrane/adapting-ourselves-to-adaptive-conten...
• http://boagworld.com/tumblog/the-truth-about-content-strategy/
• http://boagworld.com/site-content/10-ways-to-put-your-content-in-front-o...

 

By Chris Bucholtz

I’ve never seen a company so willing to apologize, and so quick to both fall on its own sword with customers and be completely transparent about issues that affect them, than Hannants, a hobby shop in the United Kingdom.

It’s not like they make many mistakes. This is a pretty well-run business. But bad things happen to all businesses, through their own mistakes or because of the mistakes of their partners. I wrote about a case of the latter two years ago when the credit card fulfillment company Hannants used suffered a security breach. Hannants dealt with it masterfully and turned a crisis into a rallying point for customers.

This email came to me yesterday – it’s another brilliant apology:

“Firstly an apology. We would like to apologise for the poor selection of kits, decals and accessories we have had in the London Colindale shop recently. We were constantly being told how the country was in a bad financial depression and no one had any money to spend so rather than buy stock we didn’t think we would sell we decided to reduce our stock levels by not replacing everything we sold as we would normally do.

We have now realised that it take a lot more than a bad economic depression to come between a modeller and his hobby!

So, with this in mind, we have just had a massive re-stock. And we do mean MASSIVE!”

A few things of note:

They could have simply trumpeted the new merchandise. But they didn’t.

They could have simply said they were responding to complaints. Instead, they put the onus for the apology on their own deficient planning. Hannants took responsibility.

After apologizing, they paid their customers a compliment (and, believe me, saying that scale modelers are committed to the hobby regardless of the economy really is a compliment!).

The apology wasn’t followed by a list of new things (that email goes out Fridays!). It was followed up by an offer for pre-orders to be picked up by customers at an upcoming airshow that Hannants where Hannants would be selling. In other words, an offer of a special service intended to save customers postal costs.

No one apologizes as perfectly as Hannants. Keep their example in mind when you make a mistake or a miscalculation – done right, it’s a chance to do right by your customers and even strengthen the relationship.

The gPlus badge plugin helps you add a Google+ badge on you website, showing all your visitors how to find you on Google+. Connect you Google+ profile page with your website, and connect with friends, fans and customers. Since Google+ pages and profiles are different, this plugin offers two slightly different versions of the badge: one for each case. Badges that link to Google+ profiles allow people to easily find you on Google+ and add you to a circle directly from your website. Badges that link to Google+ pages include these features and add some additional functionality. They help Google consolidate +1's from your website and your Google+ page, and make your website eligible for Google+ Direct Connect.

When you want to show many products in each category, this SJ VM Listing is the best choice. You can use for showing special products, selling your services, etc. The module supports about 50 parameters which help you to easy make this module to integrate with your joomla site. MAIN FEATURES: + Working with Virtuemart Component V2.x, Joomla 2.5, Joomla 1.7 + Support 4 themes + Allow to select many categories + Fully compatible IE 7+, Firefox 2+, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5 and Chrome + Order by: Recently Added / Recently Modified / Title/ Best selling/ Most reviews/ Price descending/ Price ascending/ Random + Limit number of items + Allow to enter column number and row number + Allow to enter the width of module + Allow to resize images according to: Center /Fill /Fit /Stretch /None + Turn on / off : Image / Title / Date / Read more link / Description + Easy to change color of Title / Price / Description + Custom URL + Allow to choose open link with: New Window/Same Window/Popup To have a closer look at this module, please kindly check our demo, screenshots and user-guide.

obSocialSubmit is extend-able automated social publishing engine for Joomla. This LinkedIn Group add-on adds the ability to obSocialSubmit for publishing from internet data (content, k2, virtuemart,...) to LinkedIn Group. Multiple LinkedIn Groups supported.

This convenient plugin imports albums with images from your Picasa galleries to your site built with FW Gallery. The process of import is very quick and easy. Just one click and all your Picasa albums will be moved to your FW Gallery. It saves names of imported galleries & images. Just three quick steps to create your own photography site filled in with images from Picasa: 1. Install FW Gallery 2. Install FW Gallery Picasa Import Plugin 3. Select the albums you want to import from Picasa to your site Installation requirements: * Joomla 1.5.x - 2.5.x * FW Gallery 1.6.1

CategoryList4SobiPro is exactly what the name implies, a module that lists the categories of SobiPro. Configuration of the module is straightforward, users just have to choose the section and the type of display they want. CategoryList4SobiPro module works with any number of categories and category levels! Compatible with Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5!

• Determine current version of Drupal being used
• Downloading a clean Drupal Core
• Running an initial diff (show the difference) between the two
• Run a detailed diff on
  

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Content Zoomer let you construct a pretty showcase content layout with a pretty zoom effect. Is ideal for a photographic portfolio. Make pretty your list of articles!

Article title slider module let you to create the sliding news display using your article title. This is the nice fashionable way to show all the latest article title to the user. we have option to select four different type of sliding. Feature of this module 1. Easy installation. 2. Simple and portable. 3. Easy scroll setting. 4. Option to select the category. 5. Option to choose order. 6. Option to select random order.

With the passing of the call for papers deadline last week DrupalCon Munich is now a hot topic. Witnessing a fever pitched last minute rush, we have well over 300 session proposals. It is now the role of the track chairs to evaluate submissions using the new selection process. You are encouraged to use comments to indicate sessions you would particularly like to see featured. Final conference program and pre-conference trainings will be announced May 29th via this web site.

This week Neil Kent, Events Director at Drupal Association, was in Munich to meet with conference suppliers, finalise plans at the venue and members of the local organising community team. We are pleased to confirm he has secured a limited number of double rooms at an exclusive DrupalCon rate at The Westin Grand Hotel. Following the successful forumla at DrupalCon Chicago, we are particularly excited to provide attendees exclusive use of the majority of the facilities in the Westin Grand Hotel, home of the conference. Drupalers will have the freedom to meet, code, socialise anywhere, anytime, any way they please.

Florian Loretan, Community Representative, was recently interviewed by both Lullabot and Modsunravelled podcasts. He explains the conference theme "Open Up! Connecting Systems and People" and describes how it will shape the conference. 

If you can't wait until August, the next warmup event to DrupalCon Europe is Drupal Dev Days, Barcelona. From our local team Miro Dietiker, João Ventura, Florian Loretan, Daniel Nolde, Andreas Sahle and Ralf Hendel will all be attending. Be sure to look them up to find out more about what we have in store for devops track and core conversations. For the more adventurous Drupal Camping is coming to Allersee, Germany. In the meantime why not sample some of the fabulous attractions Munich has to offer on our Pinterest board. 

The DrupalCon Global Team has seen several appointments in recent weeks. Kris Bytaert, one of instigators of the devops movement, is now devops track chair. Kris recently defined his vision of how devops at Munich. Rick Nashleanas becomes the first Global Content Manager, his latest blog post he discusses the value global chairs will contribute. Karyn Cassio has been appointed Global Community Track Chair, and blogs about how she hopes to encourage people to Come for the Software, Stay for the Community.

Tickets are selling fast. Following the success of Denver, we are confident the DrupalCon Munich will be a sell out. Go buy your tickets! Book a room at the Drupal Hotel!

Finally, if you have any questions relating to DrupalCon Munich our support team can be reached via our contact form in German or English.

Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.

First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.

It’s as easy as that!

Author Lynette Miles

Lynette Miles is the co-author of Drupal Building Blocks, and has worked in the tech industry for her entire professional career. She became involved with Drupal in 2006, and participates in the documentation team as well as coordinating the Views bug squad.

It's not a secret that Drupal 8 most likely will have in core the option of using Twig templating system.

The discussion about it happened quite fast between March-April 2012. See this issue: [meta] New theme system, where Dries commented: "I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm in support of rethinking the theme system. I'm also comfortable that the team will come up with a good solution."

Why to use a template system when PHP can be already be used as a template system?

Reason to use a template system is mainly to separate the presentation from business logic. When you use PHP as template system you are giving too much power to the presentation layer. So it's easy that things get messy mixing code and layout, and even worse: having security issues in custom themes.

John Albin stood up in Denver and said "We hand themers a loaded gun and tell them to hammer in a nail with it. Oh, and be careful"

So a template engine enforces a clean separation, using a tag-based syntax, so no PHP knowledge is needed and improves reusability of templates.
Web designers with non-programming background are the ones who most will appreciate this separation. And also preventing they do not to shoot themselves in the foot, compromising the security of your web site.

If you are not sold still, read these two articles and comments discussion of the convenience of a template engine that is not PHP:

Templating Engines in PHP, and the follow up. By Fabien, main developer of Symphony and Twig.

Twig

Twig is quite powerful, supporting macros, i18n, extensions, template inheritance, etc. From a developer point of view, Twig is that complex that almost in the line of "what's the point of learning such a complex templating language when we have PHP?"

But from a designer point of view it's more about "I have complete control to do literally anything with the content without having to bother the programmer at all".

Pros

• The main benefit of bringing Twig to Drupal will be security. The rest of pros/cons are not so important as providing a default secure HTML output.
• Powerful, expressive template language with easy syntax and very cool features
• It's widely supported among IDEs (Eclipse, PHPStorm, etc).
• Not NIH syndrome in Drupal community: It will bring Symphony and Drupal communities closer, since we are sharing more and more components
• Re-use in JavaScript? There is a github repo at least that provides Twig in JavaScript .

Possible Cons

• A little steeper learning curve for Drupal.
• (Just wondering) How tightly coupled is Twig with Symphony?
• Performance and memory could be an issue (See http://www.phpcomparison.net ), although the bottenecks of your website probably are in other places.
• (Just wondering) Headaches about versioning? If Twig is evolving constantly, how Drupal 8 core will handle it when development gets frozen.

Drupal and Twig

Some implementation details are in this post Drupal 8 Theme System Sprint. (Jacine, chx, and John Albin)

* chx's sandbox: Drupal 8 with twig

For Drupal 7 we have some also these two experimental modules

* ReneB's sandbox Twig for Drupal (Twig implemented as a theme engine)
* smokris' Twig template engine (Twig implemented as an input filter)

See also

ReneB presentation slides: Twig for Drupal @ Frontendunited Amsterdam 2012

Note: When googling about Twig, notice that most of articles, benchmarks, etc are based on old versions of Twig.
Twig has evolved a lot in the last months.

Designed to allow Joomla themes that are designed using Artisteer to have Product Category Menus using the same Vertical Menu style that is created in Artisteer. This allows for greater styling possibilities that the inbuilt Virturmart Category Menu. When you change your Artisteer theme, it will also change the Virtuemart Menu! Includes dropdown, accordion or standard Artisteer behaviours as set in the design. Designed to work with Joomla 2.5+ and Virtuemart 2.0+ and Artisteer 3.1+ Install, configure and add art-vmenu into the module class suffix. How to use: 1. Install the module using the Joomla Extensions Package Uploader. 2. Go to Extentions Module Manager, click mod_artisteer_vm_category 3. Modify the Title, enable or disable the titke. 4. Choose a position i.e left 5. Change Status to Published 6. Choose Category Layout from Default, Acordian and Dropdown. 7. Include JQuery yes or no, default is yes. 8. Included Default layout icon, this indicates a sub category or child to dropdown. 9. As with all Artisteer styling for modules, you must add art-vmenu in the Module Class Suffix

Prevent one or more usergroups from changing their email addresses! On request, I made this extension similar to my StaticPassword extension - it even works the same way. Usage is simple - enable the plugin after selecting which usergroups will be prevented from email address changes (use CTRL or Mac Command key to select multiple). When saved, the users in those groups will not be presented with the email fields when editing their account details. Additionally, it prevents submission of email addresses (just in case you get someone who thinks they're smarter than that). All of my extensions are free and none of my extensions display advertisements or links to my sites or services. If you feel that I have blessed you, then you can bless me by making a contribution to fund future development. Visit the "Website" link to make a contribution.

Sometimes Drupal opens up a big can of whoop-up process on ya, and Rules Scheduler is one of those gems.  Rule Scheduler allows you to use rule triggers to schedule rule sets.

Use Case:Ever want to send an email the day before a scheduled event?  We use CCK Sign-up and wanted to send an email to users one week before an event, as well as the day of.  We also needed to send teachers views of the roster of students

Here’s the 2 minute mojo on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55HwOzFHoB8 and it just highlights the mistakes I was making.

The recipe came out of Drupal documentaiton, and these two tutorials got me 90% of the way:

• Tutorial 2: Publish content exactly 24 hours after it was created
• Tutorial 3: Publish content based on a CCK date field

working with scheduled rules

And I thought I was home free, however I ran in to a pretty stupid problem that took me a minute to understand = all the identifiers need to have tokens in them with unique values or else they overwrite themselves in the database.

Solution? Easy = add some tokens – [node:nid] worked for me

The nicely scheduled rules

Another fun feature in this project was revisiting one of my favorite modules: Rules Views Integration.  The cool thing about scheduling a rendered view in a rule set is that the rule gets rendered at the last minute and so you can schedule (in our case) a class roster to go out and it’ll have the most up to date information possible at the time of sending.

NB: I also ran in to a problem where cron wasn’t sending my emails initially.  I have no idea why it was stuck, however Ultimate Cron has been a good friend of late and unlocking and running the tab got it back on track = I haven’t seen it stall in a few weeks now.

Ultimate Cron unlock and run run run

 

Something else I haven’t gotten into yet, however, is the use of the Rules Scheduler Views.   Something tells me there is some magic to be had in there, used correctly.  At this point however I’m just using the off-the-shelf defaults.   I know of no Views Bulk Operations for scheduled rules, so perhaps the default info is all there is to know.  In any case, it’s an elegant solution to working with drupal’s cron functions.