Banners in boost

Ajax is the way to do it; here are the directions on how to do it. In short ajax load a block
http://groups.drupal.org/node/24825

Let me know if you hit any snags, I'll help you along the way.

Get it working the simple way first once you have that down; shifting the code into the more complicated way will be fairly straight forward. If your having trouble with the simple way let me know and I can help you figure it out. First step is to get what you want to display inside a block. Once there see if you can get the simple directions to work in your case.

whats the code inside each .php?

Create 3 Blocks. In first block's content place

<div id="banner1"></div>

Repeat for the next 2. Or place these divs in your template; in short we need some empty div's to target.

In one of the blocks or somewhere else (your custom module, ect...) add in this PHP code. This will call the external php file, which will load the json data into the DOM. This only needs to happen once.

  $filename = 'ajax_blocks.php';
  $js_code = <<<EOT
$.getJSON(Drupal.settings.basePath + "$filename", {nocache: "1"}, function(response) {
  $.each(response, function(id, contents) {
    if (contents == 'NULL') {
      $(id).parent().parent().hide();
    }
    else {
      $(id).html(contents);
    }
  });
});
EOT;

drupal_add_js($js_code, 'inline', 'footer');

Finally we need to create the ajax_blocks.php file. Place this in your webroot or change filename variable above to match its location. This is a cleaner way of doing this in your case.

  include_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
  drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

  $region = "some_var";

  // Return Data
  $json = array();
  $json['#banner1'] = views_embed_view('banneri', 'block_1', $region);
  $json['#banner2'] = views_embed_view('banneri', 'block_2', $region);
  $json['#banner3'] = views_embed_view('banneri', 'block_3', $region);

  // Send JSON Back
  drupal_json($json);
  exit;

I'm assuming that the blocks contents are being sent back when you call views_embed_view(). Let me know how this works for you. Doing a selective drupal bootstrap is something to look into if this takes too long to generate the code; another way is to cache the html in the variables table (what you can do with core stats block if enabled with boost); thus only requiring a database bootstrap and no render time (regenerate the blocks content on cron then).

theres not a lot in terms of rolling your own boot strap process; I use this as my guide...
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/_drupal_bootstrap/6

ETO is heredoc syntax; looks like it should be EOT
http://php.net/types.string#language.types.string.syntax.heredoc

does this work for your case?

u try it yet? js is added at the footer so the dom should almost be fully loaded at this time.

This is great, but there should be an UI option to do this. Would be a killer feature imo.

@Flying Drupalist
This should be it's own module; call it ajax blocks. It doesn't depend on Boost and other page caches like Varnish and Core could use it. Just need to do a hook form alter of the block configuration page & add in a checkbox to ajax load this block.

@mikeytown2 if you can make this module I will kiss your feet. :)

I've tried #7 and it works like charms. but can we add a loading icon when ajax load the content? maybe a loading text. and is it possible to automatically load .js and .css required by contents?

Thanks,
Reynaldi

What ever you place in this div <div id="banner1"></div> will be replaced by the ajax content so a loading icon or text could easily be put in there.

Quick example

<div id="banner1"><img src="/misc/progress.gif" /></div>

Loading the extra js and css is a lot harder to do

hi, can you please put some example code on how to use selective bootstrap?

Thanks,
Reynaldi

Selective bootstrapping is useful for a couple of things...
1. You have what you need in the memcache/apc/database pre-rendered.
2. You want to run a small bit of code from a module & you know what the requirements are.
3. You wish to write data to memcache/apc/database

This is what I use as my guide
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/_drupal_bootstrap/6

Example of 1 + 3 is in boost_stats.php

here's a better way ;)

In one of the blocks or somewhere else (your custom module, ect...) add in this PHP code. This will call the external php file, which will load the json data into the DOM. This only needs to happen once.

  $filename = 'ajax_blocks.php';
  $js_code = <<<EOT
$.getJSON(Drupal.settings.basePath + "$filename", {nocache: "1"}, function(response) {
  $.each(response, function(id, contents) {
    if (contents == 'NULL') {
      $(id).parent().hide();
    }
    else {
      $(id).html(contents);
    }
  });
});
EOT;

drupal_add_js($js_code, 'inline', 'footer');

We need to create the ajax_blocks.php file. Place this in your webroot or change filename variable above to match its location. This is an even better way of doing this in comparison to #7.

  include_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
  drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

  // Return Data
  $json = array();
  $json['#block-views-Tweet-block_1 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('Tweet', 'block_1');
  $json['#block-views-recent_posts_domain-block_1 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('recent_posts_domain', 'block_1');
  $json['#block-views-ad_sponsors-block_1 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('ad_sponsors', 'block_1');
  $json['#block-views-ad_sponsors-block_2 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('ad_sponsors', 'block_2');
  $json['#block-views-ad_sponsors-block_3 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('ad_sponsors', 'block_3');
  $json['#block-views-ad_sponsors-block_4 .block-inner .content'] = views_embed_view('ad_sponsors', 'block_4');

  // Send JSON Back
  drupal_json($json);
  exit;

So what I have here are 3 different views with 6 different blocks getting dynamically replaced. This will "re-render" the block updating it to the latest version direct from drupal.

What I'm thinking of doing next is hiding the block until its been updated & then displaying it. Which is similar to how #7 works; just this way it doesn't require a new element to be in the DOM, uses what's already there.

http://drupal.org/project/ajaxify_regions is what I use now

Hi Following is my code:

<?php
 
	include_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
	drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
	
	$block = module_invoke('tuts', 'block', 'view', 0);
	print $block['content'];
?>

I have created a block named: Items in cart which is having following code:

<div id="cart-items"></div>
<script>
$('#cart-items').load('/cart_items.php');
</script>

Also the file cart_items.php executes a custom block as seen above named: tuts_block which is as follows:

<?php
/**
 * Implementation of hook_block
 */
function tuts_block($op = 'list', $delta = 0) {
	$block = array();
	switch ($op) {
		case 'list':
			$block[0]['info'] = t('Get the number of items in cart');
			return $block;
		case 'view':
			$block['content'] = number_of_cart_items();
			return $block;
	}
}

/**
 * Implementation of number_of_cart_items
 */
function number_of_cart_items() {
	
	$cart_items = ''; 
	$number_of_items = uc_cart_get_total_qty();
	if(!empty($number_of_items)) {
		$cart_items = '<a id="cart-items" href="' . base_path() . 'cart">';
		if($number_of_items == 1) {
			$items_text = ' item';
		}
		else {
			$items_text = ' items';
		}
		$cart_items .= $number_of_items . $items_text . '</a>';
	}
	return $cart_items;
}
?>

If I execute the cart_items.php file from browser it does show me the number of items in cart but in block Items it is showing blank. When I use Inspect elements in browser I can see that block is loaded and the above script call is coming as is as follows:

<div id="cart-items"></div>
<script>
$('#cart-items').load('/cart_items.php');
</script>

Please let me know where I am going wrong.

Not sure how it got posted twice and now could not delete second one. It does show me that its cloed and fixed where as opened it again.

Please let me know about the issue expianed above: http://drupal.org/node/657826#comment-5580816

Do you have an URL we can see to test? It will be difficult to debug otherwise.

(re-Closing issue, open a new one if necessary, with a reference to this one)