There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

One of my long-standing gripes with Views is the inability to alter the behaviour of existing Views handlers (e.g. fields, filters, etc.) without having to subclass the desired handlers to add new functionality. While the subclassing approach is fine when the functionality targets a new field type, it is not ideal if the change required should affect existing fields, across different types of handlers.

I was recently commissioned to create a module that displays tooltips on field headers, regardless of field type.

One of the technologies that made a lasting impression on me, as a young programmer, was Microsoft OLE. To give my own applications the ability to embed documents created in other applications, and vice-versa, was mind-blowing!

Last week, I described a technique to query and display nodes in all available translations. This worked well enough, but a performance-minded reader pointed out that the query generated by Views (that includes N self-joins for N enabled languages) would not scale to a large number of nodes.

My usual approach when implementing new ideas is to ensure the logic works first, and only handle optimization when needed. It's a strategy that has worked well for me in the past.

Here's a little puzzle: display a table of nodes, each row containing the same content in all available translations.

How would you do it? Stumped, I asked that question on Stack Overflow a few years ago, but never received a satisfactory reply.

Then, a couple of days ago, someone asked me if I had solved it. I hadn't thought of that puzzle since then, but I would have felt bad answering no. So, with 3 years of i18n work under my belt, I decided to give it another go.

I've needed to build a regular expression filter for a view I'm working on, so I'm sharing the code here because it might be helpful to other people as well. My specific case is that I am building a Blocks administration VBO.

Over the years, I've accumulated a large collection of e-books and digital music albums, not to mention family pictures. Information overload is not a philosophical point of view, it's a real problem that forces me to devote time, effort and money to maintain that collection.

That's probably why so many media organizers exist. Because I believe that all applications should be delivered from the Web, and because no ready-made Web media organizer struck me as fulfilling my needs, I started to write my own using Drupal 6, dubbed Mediatheque.

Web applications are changing. Whereas most of the processing used to happen on the server, the current generation of browsers is capable of performing non-trivial tasks via the increasingly powerful HTML5 + JavaScript environment. Drupal, however, is still a server-heavy platform where JavaScript is used mostly as user interface candy.

I wrote last time about the latest developments to my Views Auto-Refresh module, which periodically refreshes a Views page, either by reloading the whole view, or by incrementally inserting new items only. It's a useful tool for activity streams and other Twitter-like, real-time lists.

Still, I had a nagging feeling that my code was endangering the server. Consider this: every 15 seconds, each connected browser invokes a full Drupal bootstrap plus a full View render, just to ask the server if there are new items.

Imagine you are creating an activity stream for your site. You'd like to use Views because it gives you all the power you need to query items and style them on the page - all in time for your 11am nap. However, the resulting page is static and users have to keep refreshing it manually to see updates. In 2011, that's just uncool.

That's why I created Views Auto-Refresh, a Views Hacks sub-module that implements an auto-refreshing mechanism that integrates right into Views 2 or 3.

I've been a lazy adopter of Drupal 7. I admit it, mea culpa, but I'll leave this discussion to another post. What happened in the mean time is that VBO for D7 languished for a year or so in a zombie state until it was rescued in early May by Bojan Živanović, bojanz on d.o. He started out by announcing a sandbox project containing his code, and a few days later, I was convinced that this was the way to go for VBO on D7.