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

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.

I've been working with Feeds a lot lately. Pretty much in every project I am involved with. I am starting to consider it as an essential piece of Drupal infrastructure whenever external data of any nature is required to be pulled in.

During development and testing, one of the recurring tasks is to clear a bunch of feeds, and then re-import them. Instead of doing these operations on each feed, I thought it would be handy to use good old Views Bulk Operations to clear and import feeds in bulk.

Here's the situation: when a change occurs on a node, you want to modify a bunch of related nodes accordingly. On my site, when a Job's state moves from "accepting proposals" to "in progress", I want to change all pending Job Offers (those that haven't been accepted yet) to "closed".

One of the recurring requests in the Views Bulk Operations issue queue is to create a downloadable archive of files attached to nodes. While the general case is not trivial to solve, I was recently hired by research on BLOGS to write a more specific action: create a Zip archive of all images stored in imagefields.

I rely on actions extensively to build functionality in my sites. I find them convenient for business logic because they are packaged chunks of functionality that can be called from many places, including Trigger, Rules, and VBO. Today, I've added a new place where actions can be called: the URL. Actions REST provides this functionality.

Consider a job site where a supplier receives an invitation to participate in a project. The supplier logs on the site and views the invitation, then wants to accept or decline it.

Actions are a convenient way to package functionality in reusable chunks that can be called upon specific events. Countless modules expose actions, and at least the following consume them:

• Trigger
• Rules
• Workflow
• Views Bulk Operations

I found it useful to manually call actions in the business logic as well, typically during form submissions or in hook_nodeapi.

The taxonomy system is one of the great contributions of Drupal to the technology of CMS: the ability to classify content with multiple vocabularies. Each vocabulary represents a dimension of concern in the content being managed. Further, a single taxonomy has a flexible structure: it can be linear, tree-like, even graph-like when multiple parents are chosen. Content can be restricted to be tagged with a single term, or multiple terms can be allowed. Finally, freetagging is supported.