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

Hot on the heels of Batch API / Search integration, here is a related recipe to interactively run Drupal Queue jobs using Batch API, instead of waiting for cron or another background process to activate them:

• Set up the batch process.

I love to use Views with the core Search module. The combination allows me to create advanced search interfaces using just exposed filters.

So today I was making changes to my search index structure, and I was wondering how to regenerate the million or so entries in my index. Waiting for cron to activate the indexing would surely not do! A quick Web search yielded the module Reindex and I started chanting "There's a module for that!" to my baffled coworker.

The Quran is a significant work of literature. It has been studied and analyzed for centuries, and it is considered a reference for all followers of Islam. Many online sources offer access to the Quran, including the Quranic Arabic Corpus, a full-featured linguistic browser created by the Language Research Group at the University of Leeds.

As a native Arabic speaker, I always thought it would be interesting to own an electronic copy of the Quran which I could subject to my amateurish linguistic explorations.

I gave my "Views for Hackers" presentation at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group (aka Vancouver League of Drupalers). This is an updated version from the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit earlier this month. Roland Tanglao filmed it and posted it on Qik - thanks Roland!

Here's a short recipe to sort the results of a view using PHP. The domain of application is sorting feeds in Managing News based on the number of items each feed has.

I gave a talk about programming Views at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2010.

Earlier this year, I talked about the value of monitoring Twitter to extract valuable data. About a month ago, we finally decided to go ahead and build our application based on this concept. The core idea is pretty simple: people use the #reco hashtag to recommend things or ask for recommendations on Twitter.

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.

Compared to Tattler, one of the weaknesses of Managing News is the lack of topic monitoring - where a user inputs a keyword phrase representing a topic and the system takes care of tracking this topic across pre-selected RSS sources.

Soon after we started using Managing News, this requirement came up.

No, this is not a YouTube clone in Drupal. But it sure got your attention!

Visit DruTube and if you're interested, read on. A packaged feature is available below.

It's a little demo of a Feeds + MediaFront + Embedded Media Field + CCK + Views mashup to create a continuous-playing experience of Drupal videos on YouTube.