Views

Drupal upgrade tip: Converting from Event module to CCK Date

2008-12-23T14:09:15-06:00

If you're upgrading your site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and were previously using the event module, you have probably realized that a lot of the supporting modules that made the event module functional (such as Event Views) have fallen by the wayside. Well, as luck would have it, much (if not all) of the functionality that the event module provides can be re-created using CCK date fields, views and the calendar module. So the only task that remains is to get your existing event content migrated over into usable CCK fields, and then configure your views to display them into a calendar display.

While there are undoubtedly other approaches to achieve this end, this is a relatively quick and painless path to get the features you want up and running.

You'll require the following D6 supporting modules:
CCK - http://drupal.org/project/cck
Date - http://drupal.org/project/date
Views - http://drupal.org/project/views
Calendar - http://drupal.org/project/calendar

Install and enable the latest revisions of these modules.

Identify the content type or types currently on your site which are used by events. The process differs slightly depending on whether the resulting CCK date fields will be located in only one content type, or shared between multiple types.

Through the CCK interface, create new date fields in your existing event content type. These are the fields into which the old event information will be migrated . For the purposes of this document, I'll call them "eventstart" and "eventend".

If you have only one content type for events, your new fields will be created in the mysql table corresponding to that type. For example, if your content type was called wine_tastings, a table called content_type_wine_tastings will exist in your database, and the fields field_eventstart_value and field_eventend_value will exist in this table.

If you're sharing the eventstart and eventend fields between multiple content types, new tables will be created to house this data. In this example, the tables would be called content_field_eventstart and content_field_eventend.

Now with a little php and mysql magic, we can populate the new field data from the event_start and event_end fields from the original event table. Because the date information is stored in slightly different formats, a little bit of transformation is required. Create a php script like the example below, and execute from the command line. This example was constructed using shared date fields across multiple content types.

Remember to ALWAYS back up your database before performing any operations like this!

// You backed up your database, right?
// Set up the mysql connection
// Drupal's bootstrap function may be substituted here
// require_once '/path/to/drupal/includes/bootstrap.inc';
// drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
$con = mysql_connect('localhost', 'yourdbusername', 'yourdbpassword');
mysql_select_db('yourdbname', $con);
// Cycle through all the records in the event table 
$q = 'select * from event';
$r = mysql_query($q);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($r)){
// Transform the date information
// CCK date format: 2008-12-10T00:00:00
// event date format: 2006-11-13 15:00:00
  $startdate = preg_replace ("/ /", 'T', $row['event_start']);
// Populate the new field for eventstart
  $q2 = 'update content_field_eventstart set field_eventstart_value="'. $startdate . '" WHERE nid="'. $row['nid'] . '"';
  if (!$r2 = mysql_query($q2)){
// Don't continue if anything goes south
    exit ($q2 ." failed!\n");
  }
// Perform the same transformation and data population for the end date
  $enddate = preg_replace("/ /", 'T', $row['event_end']);
  $q3 = 'update content_field_eventend set field_eventend_value="'. $enddate .'" WHERE nid="'. $row['nid'] .'"';

// Once again, terminate the operation if the query fails if (!$r3 = mysql_query($q3)){ exit($q3 ." failed!\n"); } } ?>

Once you've got these fields populated, you should check an existing node to verify that the information has been correctly populated. Navigate to one of your event nodes, and select edit. You should see both the legacy event date information and the new CCK fields populated with the start and end dates.

If this all checks out, browse to the modules page and disable the events module. You are now free to uninstall the event module and purge any vestigial tables.

Congratulations! You have converted your event nodes to a more flexible CCK/Date setup. These fields are now available for use in views using the calendar module!

pingVision's Drupal services go Platinum as Acquia Partner

2008-12-12T07:37:59-06:00

It happened several weeks ago, and the official announcement went out ~~yesterday~~ Wednesday, so I figured it's time to blog it: pingVision is an Acquia Platinum Partner, offering IA/TA, web design, development, deployment, performance tuning and consulting services for sites built using Acquia Drupal^*.

Acquia truly escalated the Drupal world when it came out with its commercially supported distribution of Drupal. Nothing is lost. It's all gain. Because Acquia Drupal is still Drupal, still free, still licensed under the GPL. And it's co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, meaning it's not at all likely to go off on its own fork. (Dries not only wouldn't want to, it wouldn't make business sense in the open source ecosystem.)

Check out the community modules included in Acquia Drupal:

Admin Menu
Advanced Help
CCK
Fivestar
Google Analytics
Image and ImageCache
Pathauto
Printer, e-mail and PDF versions of pages
Tagadelic
and, of course, Views, the powerful query builder developed by Earl Miles that enables non-coders to create custom filtered dynamic blocks and pages of content.

A new support resource

The Acquia Network of support offers some new reassurance to website owners and operators who might be a bit leery of venturing into the deep end of the open source pool.

You can get:

Software update management
System profile management
Automated spam blocking with Mollom
Heartbeat uptime monitoring
Code modification detection
Remote cron activation
Online documentation
Site usage statistics

Acquia also has a tech support team available via web, email and telephone, depending upon subscription level.

We're delighted to offer Acquia Drupal services. It's been a real pleasure working with the Acquia team these past few weeks. We look forward to many years working together to help spread Drupal around the world.

From the press release

Acquia, provider of the commercially supported distribution of the popular Drupal social publishing system, today announced that pingVision, the Drupal web developer behind websites such as PopSci.com and Pregnancy.org, has been selected to join the Acquia Partner Program as a Platinum service provider. pingVision has received substantial and sustained recognition for its Drupal technology solutions, and is fully committed and fully equipped to deliver sustainable business growth with Acquia-powered solutions.

"pingVision has a strong reputation for its leading technology solutions and has shown a deep commitment to furthering Acquia's vision. We're excited to have pingVision join the Acquia Partner Program as a platinum member," said Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder and CEO.

pingVision has won awards for design and development of Drupal-powered websites for clients including Bonnier, E.W. Scripps & Co., Stanford University and BlogHer, and is one of the few companies providing turnkey services for enterprise Drupal websites.

"Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network are ideal for our clients of all sizes, who want that added level of support," said Laura Scott, co-founder and President of pingVision. "And by providing a fully supported distribution of Drupal for a website's foundation, Acquia affords us the opportunity to focus on the custom development, integrations and theming at the core of our business."

The Acquia Partner Program helps organizations of all sizes identify Drupal service providers with the expertise, experience and services to meet their unique website requirements. As an Acquia Platinum partner, pingVision can deliver custom solutions built on Acquia Drupal that connect to the Acquia Network for additional site management and network services, as well as technical support. Working together, Acquia and pingVision are focused on extending the reach of Drupal into new markets and application areas.

For more information, please visit: http://acquia.com/partners, and http://pingv.com.

And be sure to say hello!

Drupal's Views module unleashes new power for website administrators

2008-10-27T17:37:29-05:00

After the initial official release of Views 2 nearly two weeks ago, we felt the need to give an official rundown of how we have incorporated some of its features into our production sites. There really are too many new features to discuss in one blog post, but I will try to cover a few new features for site administrators, developers, and themers.

What is Views?

If you're not familiar with Views already, it can be a bit challenging to explain. Views is the most actively used contributed module in the Drupal repository. On the most basic level, it is used to create lists of data. The majority of a website is built upon two concepts: the first being data, the second being presentation of this data. It is for this reason that views is a vital element of many sites.

Views gives you the option to filter the data outputted by a variety of options -- including but not limited to: node type, author, taxonomy term. It also allows you to sort by a variety of different options, including: post date, updated date, number of page views, etc. The list of data can be unformatted or outputted via a table, grid, list, river-of-news, etc.

Using Views, one can create countless lists of data such as:

River of news
Image gallery
User lists
Highest-rated content

And all this can be done without touching a bit of code.

A Greatly Improved User Interface

The most obvious change with the Views 2.0 is the user interface itself. What used to be thousands of pixels in height now fits before the first page fold in a completely revamped interface.

One of the most useful new features is the ability to create multiple displays within one view. Often, one needs to create a block, page, and feed of relatively the same data. Not only does Views 2 give you this functionality, but it also presents the controls in a unified interface that allows you to quickly change configuration settings between multiple displays.

For example, if you had a page and a block display both showing the most recent 5 blog entries posted to your site, you could simply change the ‘Default’ display to show the most recent 10 entries, and that setting would trickle down to all other displays. This functionality alone decreases the amount of time needed to create and update views drastically. (Of course, one can set a display to override the default display on a per-configuration setting basis.)

Not only has the interface for creating and editing views improved, but you can now create views which are more complex. To begin, no longer is Views node-centric - meaning that one can create lists of almost any data stored in the database, from users, to comments, files, revisions, and taxonomy terms. This opens up a whole new use for views, which, before, was reserved for custom queries.

Views as Attachments

Another new feature of Views is the ability to attach view display to another. By creating a display type of ‘Attachment,’ one has the option to amend or prepend one list of data with another.

For example, creating a gallery-type view which displays the most recent image enlarged with the description to the right, and the next six most recent images’ thumbnails below is entirely too easy with Views 2 and imagecache. Simply create a display which outputs two fields: the first being the image using a large imagecache preset, the second being the node body (or other description field). Then, create an attachment display, which displays a total of 6 nodes offset by 1 (to account for the first large image), and set the imagecache preset to be a smaller thumbnail. Then, simply select your attachment display to propend to your first display, add a bit of CSS to float the large image to the left and bingo, you have a single view that looks like this:
Sample images' source: commons.wikimedia.org

Relationships in Views, and Advanced Help

Another fantastic feature is the ability to define relationships in a view. A relationship allows you to expand the original query to include additional objects.

For example, if you are using a nodequeue to order your nodes, you might want to create a view which is sorted by order within the nodequeue. Simply add a relationship to the nodequeue within the views interface, and you will see a new sort option appear:

You will notice notice in the above screenshot that there are question-mark icons next to Relationships and Sort criteria. These were added via the Advanced Help module, which makes accessing help much easier. For a feature rich module such as views, this functionality is extremely helpful.

Easy Views Theming

Theming a 1.0 View used to be a daunting task. Figuring out which theme functions to override was often difficult and, simply put, was too complicated for beginning themers. Now, Views 2.0 uses a template-based theming system. All of the information as to which tpl files to create is accessible through the user interface under Base Settings > Theme > Information. Moving to a template-based system makes the life of a themer much brighter.

Although all of the discussed features are quite wonderful, the most useful addition to Views 2 is, undoubtedly Live Preview. No longer do you have to save your view, which tabs, and refresh. Instead, everything is handled on one screen, allowing you to work more efficiently.

Views + [other Drupal modules]

There are many contributed Drupal modules that integrate well with Views, making Views all the more powerful and useful.

For example, we are using Views to handle some complex workflows. With the combination of Workflow, Actions, Triggers, NodeQueue, and Views, one can create a feature-rich site that handles complex content creation workflows demanding moderation, approval, and promotion stages. Workflow integrates seamlessly with Views, allowing you to create lists of all nodes in a certain state. Integration of Workflow with Views also adds many other useful filters, sorts, and fields.

We have also used Views to create a custom search page with customizable sort options. It seems that almost every week we find a new use for Views that shortens our time spent on these types of tasks, allowing us to spend more time making sites even more functional than before.

A Valuable Drupal Toolset Created by a Most-Valuable Drupal Player

A special shout out from all of us at pingVision to Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) who was recently voted Drupal's MVP by Packt Publishing mainly for creating such a wonderful contribution to the Drupal community.

Combining different views using views offsets

2008-02-22T11:07:36-06:00

We recently had a client that wanted to have two different teaser treatments for a node type on their homepage: The first node would show more content, while the other nodes would have less content displayed. This is common for displays where you want, for example, a highlighted top post with more abbreviated lower posts.

We approached this using two views. The top view would return the top node of the view, while the second view would return everything but the most recent item, while displaying different teasers. The first view was easy: simply the most recent node of that type that had been published.

The second view, however, was created by using two functions from the views module and placed in the page-front.tpl.php file:

views_get_view($view_name)
views_build_view($type, &$view, $args = array(), $use_pager = false, $limit = 0, $page = 0, $offset = 0, $filters = NULL)

We used views_get_view() to get the view object for the view and set it to a variable:

$second = views_get_view('Secondary_topics'); 
?>

Next we used the views_build_view() to display the view on the home page:

print views_build_view('embed', $second, array(), FALSE, 5, 0, 1);
?>

We stated the type as embed because the view is being embedded in a page. The the next parameter, $second, is the views object, which was returned by the views_get_view function.

To achieve the goal of getting five teaser views starting at the second most recent topic, we set the $limit parameter to 5 and the $offset parameter to 1.

For the other view that only displays the most recent node topic we used the same two functions, but set the $limit parameter to 1 in the views_build_view function:

$first = views_get_view('Front_Page');
print views_build_view('embed', $first, array(), false, 1);
?>

We placed both of these steps into the page-front.tpl.php template in the appropriate places to display the content on the page and in the order that is needed.

Now the new issue is this: both contents look the same because the views are both calling the same node.tpl.php file and there is no flag to check for which view is being used.

To resolve this issue we used the global variable $current_view as a flag. The $current_view variable is an object that contains the name of the view being used ($current_view->name). We placed the $current_view variable at the top of the node.tpl.php template file. Next we used a conditional statement (if..elseif..else) to have the node.tpl.php file display different content for each view on the same page.

 global $current_view; 
?>

This displays content for the first topic view on the front page, but not for the other view on the front page:

if(($current_view->name == 'Front_Page') && $is_front): ?>
This will only display in the first view on the front page.
endif; ?>

I hope this helps other Drupal users. If anyone else has come across this and did it a different way, please share.