Application Toolbar (Appbar)

This documentation applies only to the Drupal 6 version. The alerts system was removed from the Drupal 7 version.

The Application Toolbar module, abbreviated Appbar, provides a toolbar that stays at the bottom of the window (like Facebook's Application Bar). The Appbar can hold blocks 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. Blocks can be displayed either inline on the toolbar or in a dialog that appears over the bar when the subject of the block is clicked.

The Appbar can easily be re-styled by another module or with drop-in stylesheets. Four styles are provided by default: Classic, Blue, Dark, and Wunderbar.

Administrators can send alerts to all users from the settings page. They can also choose on which pages and to whom 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.

Messaging

The Messaging module is a framework for deciding how users should be notified about events on the site. One of the ways Messaging allows notifying users is through Appbar alerts.

Recording alerts

There are several ways to record alerts.

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 integrates with the Messaging module, so any messages routed through Messaging can be sent to the Appbar as alerts.
4. It is also possible to write a module using the Appbar API to set alerts directly. This method should only be used for site-specific modules since there is no way for administrators to turn off alerts that are explicitly set in code.