Just released a new Drupal site for our clients A-Team Group at http://low-latency.com as the first part of an initiative to spilt their current site into separate channels and services in order to better serve their audiences.

We used Open Publish for a base and although the theme may look familiar to the vanilla one that ships with OP there is a fair amount of jiggery-pokery behind the scenes.The sites extra features include a business directory of relevant company listings, a wiki-style glossary for low latency terms and the ability to attach post event resources such as audio, video and slides to the event node to keep all information in one place.

Site Layout is a mixture of context and Panels giving our clients full control for the positioning of information and the search and contextually relevant links are controlled by Apache Solr.

Custom login and integration with Salesforce and Google Analytics allows them to capture important data about their audience and users and track site use and download trends.

This is a brief explanation of how we use taxonomy in Drupal to classify, navigate and find content. Each site or application we build uses taxonomy in a different way but these basic principles and definitions remain the same.

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification according to natural relationships. In Drupal, this is one method administrators use to organize content in a web site. Taxonomy is created from ‘Vocabularies’ that contain related ‘Terms’. A Drupal site can have an unlimited number of vocabularies each containing an unlimited number of terms. Vocabularies can be applied to any number of different content types, can be restricted to certain predefined terms and also can be mandatory.

Glossary of Drupal Taxonomy

Vocabulary

A collection of terms

Term / Tag

A single entry into a vocabulary - the word tag is more commonly used to describe a term without hierarchy.

Controlled vocabulary

Terms within the vocabulary are defined and additions are restricted.

Free tagging / Folksonomy

The ability for users to add new terms to a vocabulary - allows users to collectively classify and find information.

Hierarchy

Within a vocabulary terms can exist in sub-categories (up to 7 deep) to provide further classification.

Synonym

Two or more terms can be interchangeable or linked so they act as one. This reduces errors with duplication, we can consider the terms: Health and Safety; Health & Safety; and healthandsafety as one term.

Example of Drupal Taxonomy

A Taxonomy vocabulary classifying music by genre with terms, sub-terms and a synonym.

Vocabulary = Music

• term = classical
  • sub-term = concertos
  • sub-term = sonatas
  • sub-term = symphonies
• term = jazz
  • sub-term = swing
  • sub-term = fusion
• term = rock
  • sub-term = soft rock *synonym* sub-term = light rock
  • sub-term = hard rock

This example is expanded from the example of Drupal Taxonomy at: http://drupal.org/node/774892

crispin

We were asked recently to provide an .xls export of all the subscribers to a newsletter (using the Simple News module) that could be accessed via a menu link restricted by role. This fell outside of the (brilliant and saucy) capabilities of the views bonus pack.

We created a node, with a specific page template that would fire off the xls. Props to Sean Barton for the his example at http://www.sean-barton.co.uk/2009/01/xls-download-from-php-class/ which strangely, was posted on my (Dave here, hello!) birthday!

We added the class from Sean’s post to our library in the template.php file in our theme folder.

Then created a page-node-xx.tpl.php in our theme to add the data. This queried for subscriber’s emails, usernames and whether they had an active subscription (to add more columns add more elements to the $mails[] statement).

<?php
//get simplenews subs and details
$query = 'SELECT DISTINCT s.mail AS mail, u.name AS name, s.activated AS active FROM {simplenews_subscriptions} s INNER JOIN {users} u ON s.uid = u.uid';

      $result = db_query($query);
    
     while ($mail = db_fetch_object($result)) {
        $mails[] = array($mail->mail, $mail->name, $mail->active);     
      }
   

    if (isset($mails)) {
      $exported_mails = implode(", ", $mails);
    }
    else {
      $exported_mails = t('No addresses were found.');
    }
 
//Require the file
    require_once ('xls.class.php');

    //Instantiate the class.
    $xls = new xls();

   
    $array = $mails;
   
    //Triggers the download using the passed array
    $xls->download_from_array($array);
    ?>



This way we can give role based access to the download, via the permissions admin,  and include a link in the admin toolkit for the site. People LOVE spreadsheets.