modules

While working on our last project I realized that we haven't used breadcrumbs in a theme for a while (well that is not entirely really true, we use them a lot for the admin section). We came across of what we first thought was a bug; the breadcrumbs weren't following the primary links herarchy and were only displaying the "Home" link.

Google here we go, search... search... read... read... read more... and after a lot of trial and error I found the the solution: Custom Breadcrumbs and Menu Breadcrumb.

Now that you have these modules installed and enabled... sorry, what? Not ready yet? Ok, let me know when you're ready... (Meanwhile, Alberto is doing important research) ........................... Huh, what was that? Installation completed? Great, then let's continue.

A few (well, three - I'm saying three counts as a few) people over at g.d.o asked to try out a module I wrote for a client of ours a few weeks ago. So I'm putting up the first beta of it here.

Behold, the first generation of the MailChimp Import module (Drupal 6 only). This module does no more, and no less, than import your MailChimp campaigns into your Drupal site as nodes. Why would you want to do that, when MailChimp already provides online versions of your newsletters? Because your client asks for it, that's why. Perhaps they want to be able to file their sent newsletters alongside their other content, in the system of taxonomy that suits their particular mental aesthetic. Perhaps they want website visitors to be able to find articles in their old newsletters from the search box in the header of their Drupal site. Perhaps they don't trust that cheerful monkey.

This past weekend was the Drupal7 Contrib Module Upgrade Sprint that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) organized at the NowPublic offices in Vancouver. I spent a good part of Saturday there, helped out with coaching the one brave beginner who turned up to learn some of the tools for helping out in the community. Otherwise, after a bit of a rough start, the devs all hunkered down and made some Drupal magic, upgrading super important things like Views, Panels, database stuff, and various other bits and pieces of modules and themes.

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at the Features module, created by the fine people at Development Seed, including a review of the challenges that led to its creation, the current state of the module, how to start using it, resources, and a note on how we've been using it ourselves.

Background

Everyone who's spent hours doing the same site configurations over and over again, for one site and then another, knows how repetitive config tends to be.  Install profiles have been the main tool for avoiding this work for the last couple years, but even with the (now defunct) install profile wizard, many people found them to be a bit overwhelming to figure out and start using at a production level.  Yet install profiles have grown to be fairly well used, especially since they can be customized and reused for certain types of sites - sport teams, churches, radio stations, languages, etc. - there's a big list of them here.