Goes through the process of creating a view of something other than content. In this case it's a view of users, and this chapter talks about other types of views of entities that are possible from different base tables.
This video series will continue the Job Board example from the Fields for Site Builders series where we will discover ways to display all of the job postings, allow people to find the one they are looking for and easily apply for it.
This screencast shows how you can use Rules to alter the presentation of your Drupal site, such as:
- Enabling, disabling and moving blocks around
- Setting HTML title element and also on-page titles
- Setting body classes
- Setting the active menu item (using Menu Position)
Some bigger questions about using Rules for altering presentation is also discussed:
- Using Rules for presentation altering is relatively heavy. (It consumes about 2.5 MB more PHP memory than Context, and has about the same loading times – judging from a first, rough comparison.)
- Using Rules for presentation altering gives a more complex UI than the interface use for modules made for more particular use cases.
- It is possible for modules to provide alternative user interfaces to Rules.
- Rules allows reusing actions in many different situations, between different modules.
- Rules (and Entity API) provides generalized data handling.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
More Rules Link
FreeThis screencast shows some more settings in the Rules Link module:
- How to use the visibility conditions in Rules Link.
- That the entity the link is attached to is always available as a parameter.
- That you can add more variables to the Rules Link by passing them in the URL – and that you need to set up the parameters settings to tell the link how to interpret the data.
- That each link is available as a field in Views.
- That you can add parameters to links displayed in Views.
- That there is a bug preventing links for non-node entities to be displayed in Views.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows some functionality included in Rules Bonus Pack, as an example of how to make Rules integrate with other modules on your site. In particular it shows some Views and CTools/Page manager integration.
- Condition: Check the number of results from a view.
- Action: Load the sum of a Views column as a number. (Currently only D6!)
- Action: Load the first result in a view into Rules.
- Action: Clone a full node object.
- Action: Convert a number into a date
- Event: Trigger a rule when a custom page is rendered.
- Special: Allow Rules condition components to be used as CTools access plugins.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencasts presents some of the settings available when configuring a bulk operations view. It covers:
- Controlling access to your VBO, and why that is important.
- Showing actions as buttons rather than a select list.
- The new cool option for selecting all items on all view result pages.
- Turning check boxes into radio buttons.
- Showing or hiding the result of the bulk operations.
- Showing action configuration on the view page.
- How to skip the confirmation page.
- How to give your actions customized labels.
Additional resources
Views Bulk Operations (VBO) guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast introduces the awesome Views Bulk Operations (VBO) module, that can be used to perform actions on objects listed with Views. The screencast covers:
- How to add VBO fields to your views, to allow actions
- That these fields are displayed as check boxes (or possibly radio buttons) in your view
- That each VBO field is tied to one type of data in the view (such as nodes, node revisions or users)
- That some VBO actions have configuration pages
Additional resources
Views Bulk Operations (VBO) guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to repeat scheduled events – in this case sending repeated reminders to users who have not logged in for a month. The screencast covers:
- How to set up a component for scheduling (as seen before)
- The point of re-using an ID for scheduled tasks, to avoid duplicate reminders
- The trick of finding a good triggering event for scheduling (which is not always easy)
- The trick of having a component schedule itself upon completion, thereby repeating the scheduling
- How to delete scheduled tasks, and why that may be a good idea
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows “how you can use multiple-parameter Rules components in VBO and get the additional parameters as action configuration,” which translates to:
- If you have more than one parameter for a Rules component, you can still use it with VBO.
- Any additional parameters will be displayed as action configuration, meaning that the person executing the VBO gets to choose parameter value.
- Sadly, you can’t access data from the view item being actioned – you’ll have to stick with fixed input values. (If you want to use data from the processed item, you could actually do this inside the Rules component!) This is an issue being worked on.
- If you have complex parameters – such as taxonomy terms instead of just an integer – you can (mostly) use entity ID in the direct input mode.
- You can, by coding, change the form elements used for input. It is probably better to target the Rules data widget than doing a standard form_alter, but both will work.
- You could, for example, use this for changing comment settings on nodes, or adding selected tags to nodes. (Both examples shown in this screencast.) You could also use it for, say, sending customized messages or something. Or cloning existing nodes with changes specified in parameters.
- Bonus: If you add an entry to a multiple-value field in an entity, Rules won’t pick up that the entity has changed – make sure to add a “save entity” action in the rule.
Not mentioned in this screencast but still good to know:
- You can have Rules components without any parameters as well. No sweat.
- You can use Rules components without any parameters matching the View type too. In that case, you’ll have to specify all the parameters manually.
- If you have a component with several parameters matching the view type, the first one will be auto-populated by VBO – the rest you have to set manually.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to start using Rules Scheduler. It does this by mimicking the Comment Closer module – closing the comments on articles two weeks after they are created. The screencast covers:
- Rules Scheduler needs components – you can only schedule prepared components
- Components can be scheduled as actions, for example from reaction rules
- The evaluation time for scheduled tasks is set with strtotime(), which means that you can use highly flexible expressions
- You can also use data selection, combined with offsets if you want to
- Every scheduled task should have a unique task ID, or it will replace existing tasks
- Scheduled tasks are displayed under the Schedule tab on the Rules admin pages
- You can delete tasks manually if you want to
- You can schedule tasks manually, without the need of reaction rules
- It is sometimes useful to execute rule components manually, to see that the scheduled tasks will work as expected
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast presents a way to help manage article promotions, separate content types used for promoting articles, providing more flexibility than standard teasers. The screencast shows how to have promotion nodes being published, unpublished and deleted in sync with the articles they belong to. Topics covered are:
- Reacting on the node deletion event.
- Using fetch entity by property to load a list of all relevant promotion nodes.
- How to have the loaded list unlimited in length.
- Using the delete entity action.
- How to call rule components from a reaction rule.
- Why it might be a good idea to have actions in separate components when acting on node updates.
- Cloning rule components.
- Publishing and unpublishing nodes.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to set up Rules to allow comment writers to be notified when replies are posted to their comments. It covers:
- Adding a checkbox to the comment form, turning on or off reply notifications
- Sending e-mails to the comment author when new comments are posted
- Not sending e-mails when replying to own comments
- Some words about checking “entity has field” on the correct entity
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to set up Rules to allow node authors to – optionally – receive e-mail notifications when comments are posted to his or her content. It covers:
- Adding a checkbox to user accounts, turning on or off comment notification
- Sending e-mails to a node author when new comments are posted
- Not sending e-mails to the author if he/she was the one writing the comment
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
In this video we take a look at several advanced configuration options when working with calendars. We start off by talking about the various pager options available and how that works with AJAX, and then we explain how you can keep track of the current date that someone is viewing the calendar in as they move through the various displays. We wrap up by covering three methods for working with caching to improve your site's performance, as calendars can be intensive, depending on the site. We'll discuss caching with the Entity cache module, using the Date API date caching, and then review using views caching.
Additional resources
In this presentation Karen walks us through the basic concepts of the Organic Groups 7.2 module, also known as OG. She looks at what OG can do for us, explains how it works in Drupal 7 with entities, and does a brief comparison of OG with a multi-site installation.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will cover what is necessary to use repeating/multiple dates on a single event. After getting the proper modules installed and a content type to handle repeating dates, we show you how the calendar module handles this out of the box. We go even further and explain how everything is setup to give you a better understanding of all the settings necessary to make this happen.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will configure the day view even further by adding our taxonomy field as a method of grouping events. This will give us the ability to show events grouped together in a column to further organize our day view.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will cover customizing the day and week view. Sometimes your events may have the same or close to the same start times, this can start to make your calendar look very complicated. We will show you how to utilize the overlapping feature and all of the settings to make the display easier to look at for your viewers. We will also discuss how to bring focus to certain time periods and some more advanced settings pertinent to the week and month view.
Additional resources
In this lesson we add some usability to our calendars with color-coded striping. You get to pick which colors represent which taxonomy terms so that each calendar event is marked. Alternatively, you can stripe your calendars by content type. We also add the Legend block to our sidebar that shows what each color represents.
Additional resources
Do you find that you have too many events on one day and that it is skewing the look and feel of your calendar? You have options! You can set a maximum number of events that display per day and include a 'more' link that takes you directly to the View of that specific day. Does that inconsistency bother you? You can make the link appear for any day that has any number of events.