Application Toolbar (Appbar)

The Application Toolbar module, abbreviated Appbar, provides a toolbar that stays at the bottom of the window (like Facebook's Application Bar). By default, the Appbar can hold links from a menu on the left, and an "alert" dialog on the right. The alert dialog refreshes automatically via AJAX at an administrator-defined interval, and shows updates from the site that are relevant to the current user.

Other modules can easily add new regions to the Appbar, and the Appbar can easily be re-styled by another module or with drop-in stylesheets. Three styles are provided by default: Classic, Blue, and Dark.

Alerts can be provided by other modules; Appbar also has a submodule, Appbar Defaults, which provides alerts for Drupal core modules. Appbar can also take over the display of system messages. In addition, Administrators can send alerts to all users from the settings page. Each kind of alert can be enabled or disabled by the administrator.

Administrators can choose whether to always show the Appbar or let users choose whether to have the Appbar enabled. Administrators can also choose on which pages the Appbar will appear.

Integrations

Appbar itself integrates explicitly with these modules, but other modules may integrate with Appbar in addition to those listed below.

Views

Appbar can use Views to display the list of alerts. It also provides its own Views integration so that administrators can create their own arbitrary lists of alerts.

Activity

Appbar can use updates from the Activity module as alerts. This allows somewhat finer control over the actual text that is displayed in alerts.

Menu Icons

Menu Icons allows you to choose an image to show with or instead of the menu items on the Appbar.

Triggers/Actions

Appbar provides an action for the core Actions module so that any module that provides triggers can be configured to set an arbitrary Appbar alert.

Rules

The Rules module is a more powerful version of the core Triggers/Actions modules so you can set up more advanced conditions for an alert to be recorded.

Other modules

There are several ways to record alerts if default alerts are not provided.

1. Appbar integrates with the Activity module, so if the module in question integrates with Activity then you just have to enable Activity messages in the Appbar settings and alerts from the relevant module will appear.
2. Appbar integrates with the core Trigger/Actions modules and with the more powerful Rules module so that you can record an arbitrary message when another module triggers an event (assuming the module in question integrates with triggers).
3. Appbar provides an extensive API that you could use to write a patch for the relevant module.