Drupal

I wrote my first blog post on the company blog the other day. It was about the frustratingly poorly documented problem of sending emails with attachments in Drupal. I also add on a neat little trick for hijacking the print module to print pdf versions of content on the site, and pipe it directly into the attachment - no saving a copy of every pdf you generate on the site. Head on over there for the full text.

Drupalcon Chicago is coming up in about a week! I am super excited to go to my first Drupalcon. Luckily Grand Valley has spring break that week so I don't even have to miss any school. I hope to do a wrap up post on here describing my experience. I am looking forward to learning a lot and meeting some contacts.

I am also looking forward to going to Chicago. I go to Lollapalooza every year and I also have a brother in law in Chicago so I end up going to Chicago 2 or 3 times a year and it is always enjoyable.

Yoxview is a wicked rad jQuery lightbox-style image viewer. I recently stumbled across this plugin while looking for a lightbox module for Drupal 7, only to discover that there was no D7 support yet. So I searched on some terms until I found the Yoxview Image Viewer plugin. Unfortunately, the Drupal module is broken. Searching through the issue queue you can find that there is a simple patch that fixes the module for the latest D7 releases. The module is super simple and simply adds yoxview to the displays that you can apply to content fields. There is no configuration options inside of Drupal itself, but all the options for yoxview are easy to configure via javascript.

I added these configuration options directly to the yoxview.js file included in the module. I'm sure there is a better way, but I figured since I had patched the module, I was already altering the module anyway. My yoxview.js file for this site looks like this

Yoxview also contains a ton of gallery options and can even play videos and slideshows. I haven't used many of these options yet. I just love the animation and the functionality of the image viewer.

Have you used Yoxview? What about other lightbox style plug-ins? Do you have an alternative that is currently supported on Drupal 7?

We have just launched a new version JaiPlace.com! This is a website project I picked up somewhat randomly 2 months ago. I was working down at The Factory, when I met someone involved with Momentum MI. One of the Momentum MI companies was having trouble getting their site to display images properly. I mentioned that I work a lot with Drupal, and took a look at their site and had them fixed up in 5 minutes. The site was in rough shape when I found it. It had been worked on by a developer who did not have much Drupal experience. I impressed them so much that they switched to me as their developer.

This new version is significantly better than the old version that was launched, however, it is not where it needs to be. My goal with the first iteration was simply to get the navigation improved and increase the overall usability - since the site was basically unusable before. The ultimate goal of the site is to be a community site for people interested in Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS), and allow vendors to sell their own LOHAS products via an Etsy-like marketplace.

JaiPlace is still quite rough, but there is plenty to come, and I will probably be announcing major feature releases on this site.