Outline Designer
The outline designer module is a visual way of structuring content in books. As there was no drag and drop functionality in Drupal 5.x, this allows you to easily manipulate content and branches of content in Drupal books. It uses a drag-and-drop / right click context menu system to centralize many common Drupal tasks into one Ajax'ed interface. It was originally designed for use by instructional designers who had no concept of how to use Drupal and recently was trimmed down to be globally useful to any/all drupal sites. It also allows for several other functions that currently aren't available in drupal including:
- Duplicate a Book
- Duplicate a Branch of nodes (or a single node)
- Change content types
- Associate an icon to a node type
- Upload and associate new icons to node types
Other efficiencies that it provides include:
- Rename nodes inline
- Change node type inline
- delete content or branches of content on the fly
- delete books on the fly
There are several configuration options including:
- Configure who can access the outline designer
- Configure what icons are associated to each content type and associate your own
- Configure what types can be added / changed in the outline designer
It also sets up for the following permissions as well as obeys other books / content based structures such as:
- Drag and drop content
- Change content types
- Outline Postings (toggle add child)
- Create new Books
- edit {content_type} content
- edit own {content_type} content
- edit own book pages
- edit book pages
The only dependency is that books and upload modules are turned on and installation is fairly straight forward. Check out the demo if you're skeptical. The plan is to convert this to D6 and D7 and make it extend the current D6 drag-and-drop functionality to allow for Ajax updates. All js files have been compressed for optimization's sake and all source files are included in a separate 'source' folder for all you developers out there. Also, several builds will have an ajax.php file thrown in which is there for historical purposes (it does nothing in new versions).
Development Roadmap for 1.6:
- Menus integration -- book outline will be mapped to a menu group
- Performance boost / rewrite -- don't do reweighing...constantly among other performance based issues
- Integration with Taxonomy terms -- gmail like listing of terms associated with each node as well as context menu integration for quick adding things to terms
- Integration with Search and Replace -- highlight where terms appear within the nodes shown
- Minor OG integration -- Automatically associate content nested under a group w/ that group by default. Nest groups as subgroups when done there too
- Work on any part of the structure -- instead of just the book roots, open up the books at any level to work on smaller portions of a structure w/o loading EVERYTHING in big books
- Glitches - certain symbols don't come across correctly in JavaScript, Still looking into it but this needs to get fixed
Development for the future / need help!:
- Ajax based loading of deeper structures instead of loading...EVERYTHING at once
- Improve Performance more -- especially with this issue http://drupal.org/node/292846
- Port to Drupal 6.x
- Better menu integration (current plan is light, just get it working)
- Integrate HTML Export capabilities into the context menu for fast exporting of specific data
Releases
| Official releases | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.x-1.5 | 2008-Jul-15 | 55.71 KB | Download · Release notes | Recommended for 5.x |  |
| Development snapshots | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.x-1.x-dev | 2008-Jul-16 | 64.76 KB | Download · Release notes | Development snapshot |  |
