Trellon blogs

Introducing CRM Core

mhaggerty — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:35:06 +0000

CRM Core is a set of modules for managing contact records within a Drupal site, providing support for contacts, relationships and activities. It provides the basic tools organizations need to effectively track the relationships they maintain with people, along with a framework for extending that support to handle other use cases.

Our team has been working on CRM Core the release of Drupal 7, keeping in mind the idea that Drupal now has the potential to be a lot more than a CMS. Originally started as a proof of concept, this set of modules has grown to become a solution we have used when working with groups that don't work well with traditional CRM approaches. Now that it is being used by a number of organizations, we wanted to share some information about the system and how you can put it to work as a solution for managing contact information.

Creating your own entities with Entity API

ygerasimov — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:25:10 +0000

There have been plenty of articles about Drupal 7 and entities already. Entities are great. They provide a unified way to work with different data units in Drupal. Drupal 7 is all about entities. They are everywhere: nodes, users, taxonomy terms, vocabularies...

Let's take a closer look at how developers can create their own entities using the Entity API module, which is a great toolbox.

Customizing Apachesolr facets built by FacetAPI with the power of CTools

ygerasimov — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:41:29 +0000

The Apachesolr module (7.x) allows us to build sites that use powerful search technology. Besides being blazingly fast, Apachesolr has another advantage: faceted search.

Faceted search allows our search results to be filtered by defined criteria like category, date, author, location, or anything else that can come out of a field. We call these criteria facets. With facets, you can narrow down your search more and more until you get to the desired results.

Sometimes, however, the standard functionality is not enough. You might want or need to customize the way that facets work. This is controlled by Facet API. Unfortunately there is not much documentation for Facet API, and the API can be difficult to understand.

This post will change that!

In this post, you will learn how to use FacetAPI to create powerful custom faceted searches in Drupal 7. I will take a look at the UI of the module as well as its internals, so that we can define our own widgets, filters, and dependencies using some cool ctools features.

Looking ahead to Drupalcon Denver

sbroz — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:00:35 +0000

With each week that DrupalCon Denver is coming nearer, the excitement in the community grows. At Trellon, we're not immune to that excitement, and we're proud to be a Platinum sponsor of Drupalcon Denver. We're looking forward to seeing members of the Drupal community there, both old friends and new. We're excited about the opportunity that Drupalcons give us not only to learn more about the direction of Drupal, but to help shape it. We're eager to learn what new and exciting things people around the world have been doing with Drupal.

DrupalCamp Foz - New steps for Drupal in Latin America

franz — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:07:39 +0000

Last week I attended LatinoWare 2011 in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, which also hosted, among a number of events, DrupalCamp Foz. There hasn't been a Drupalcamp in Brazil for some time already, so this was a really important event for the Drupal community in Brazil. The community is growing in Brazil and other Latin America countries. At the Drupalcamp, we had representatives from Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico. We also had the presence of our dear Drupal creator, Dries Buytaert.

Using CTools Access Rulesets in module development.

ygerasimov — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:18:29 +0000

CTools is a powerful toolbox for Drupal developers, but there are many features of this huge module that aren't well known or used. I would like to share some of my experience with using one of those lesser-known features: CTools Access Rulesets.

In this article you'll learn how to utilize the nice CTools Access Rulesets GUI in combination with some custom code to limit file downloads based on certain criteria. This promotes generic code and separates the access logic out to a place where it is customizable by a site administrator.

This gives you the ability to use flexible and powerful Panels selection rules outside of Panels.

Create a low bandwidth version of your site using the Context module.

ygerasimov — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:58:40 +0000

In this article I would like to talk about creating low bandwidth versions of websites running on Drupal 6.x.

The times of dial-up and other types of slow internet connections are (almost) over, but sometimes it's still important to give your users the option to experience a light version of your website. I will explain how to implement such functionality using the context module. This will also serve as a good example of how to write context conditions.

The idea is pretty simple; If a user clicks on a 'Low bandwidth version' link, we hide some “heavy” blocks on the site. As the context module can hide and show blocks, we only need to implement a condition and use it to switch between versions of the site.

Boosted Varnish - High Performance Caching made easy

ffranz — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:50:57 +0000

Note: I am hosting a BoF at DrupalCon London about this: Join us in Room 333 on Thursday 25th August from 11:00 - 12:00 (second half).

Varnish and Boost are normally seen as one-or-the-other. However this does not need to be the case. This article introduces a configuration which allows any site running Boost to run Varnish additionally and make the site both much faster and much more scalable. It also allows you to make use of Boost's advanced expiration features (until the expire module is finished) and combine this with Varnish. I'll show an easy howto method for adding Varnish, and - for those being more experienced in VCL - why this works the way it does.

CiviCRM Upgrade - Foreign keys / Constraint violation issue

franz — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:39:51 +0000

Well, it is just about time for CiviCon. Even though I am not going, I want to relay a good CiviCRM war story.

Recently, we went through the process of upgrading a CiviCRM site (Drupal 6.x - CiviCRM 3.4). This can turn into a painful process if you aren't careful, and sometimes even when you are. Among the possible issues you may run into, there are some nasty errors that break the upgrade process when attempting the database upgrade script. I'm going to tell you how to get past them.

First attempt

Webform Bonus Pack: email routing in webforms

vmirgorod — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 07:20:01 +0000

We would like to announce the creation of the Webform Bonus Pack module which allows you to do email routing and to send submissions digests in specific formats to a configured set of emails on cron.

This blog post aims to show different approaches of email routing (i.e.conditional emailing), to explain pros and cons of these approaches, and to show how to handle email routing efficiently using Webform Bonus Pack module.