Trellon - Drupal Planet

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.

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.

Activism module released!

rzamor — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:28:42 +0000

Back in January I wrote about using Drupal as a tool to create decentralized online advocacy campaigns and the upcoming release of the Activism module. We

The Activism module is a framework which we hope will standardize the way in which online advocacy tools are built and deployed with Drupal based websites. The module comes packaged with three modules out of the box:

DC CiviCRM Meetup this Wednesday!

rzamor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:12:02 +0000

The adoption of CiviCRM in the past couple of years has boomed, and as of late we have taken on some rather large implementations of the CRM system for advocacy and international development organizations. The CiviCRM community has been lacking local user groups to support developers, administrators and persons interested in learning more about the platform. In response to this need, we have decided to start the first Washington DC CiviCRM Meetup group.