Hello,

Two months ago, a case study about the migration of France 24 from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 was posted on drupal.org frontpage, and it was announced some really interesting modules were going to be open sourced.

I'm happy to say it is (almost?) finished, and here is the list of modules:

  • Multimedia Element: It allows you to create blocks (not drupal blocks) containing stories (inserted manually, automatically, semi-automatically with Easy View), carousels of stories, text, photos, diaporamas (including lightbox diapos), video, twitter, table, ... And you can embed these blocks directly into your story with a nifty FckEditor plugin. Here is a nice example of story with a carousel, a diaporama and a video multimedia element.
  • Easy View: Easy View is a very easy and powerful interface framework to Views, in a CCK field. It also include Easy View Taxonomy, the easy view implementation of the taxonomy View. It basically allows a simple user to configure a View per node without using the complex View UI.
  • Uberimage: Uberimage is an advanced image CCK field, with direct upload/nodereference support, result imagecache presets re-scaling and cropping, useful on websites with multiple different image ratio (16/9, 4/3, 16/5, ...)
  • Formatter Selector: Ever wanted to let the user choose the theme of a node in a nodereference directly on the node edit page? This module allows you to do that.
  • External Sources / Externodes: Basically, this module allows you to map the nid and fid address space to another Drupal instance. A simple example: Given you have two drupals, if you type in your browser front.drupal.com/node/1000000001, it will in fact display the node 1 of back.drupal.com using front.drupal.com theme. back.drupal.com is nowhere visible to the end user. Basic example of use: A big image collection you want to share between drupals.
  • Nodeselect: Nodeselect allows editors to search for content, in a simple exposed View integrated with Embedded Edit, and results can be drag and dropped into nodereferences.
  • Embedded Edit: Embedded Edit allows you to create/view/edit a node in a kind of lightbox within a node edit page. When creating a node, a nodereference will get filled with this node.
  • Views CCK Formatter: Views CCK Formatter allows you to choose a node CCK formatter as a row style in your View. This is extremely useful when you want to reuse a node theme in different parts of your website.
  • CSV Table: CSV table is a very simple table module that allows you to upload a CSV file in this CCK field, and display a table. This module will probably evolve a lot in the future.
  • JCarousel for Views: JCarousel for Views is a simple module for using JCarousel in Views.
  • JCarouself formatter framework: JCarousel formatter framework contains the JCarousel plugin plus a node CCK Formatter <-> JCarousel theme relationships framework.
  • Utilities: An utilities modules used by all the above modules.

Sorry, no pictures :( You can find them here or directly on the module project page.

Concerning theming, the France24 and RFI websites are heavily based on the standard CCK nodereference formatters, that's why almost all these modules are using it. I'll probably make some doc on how to combine all these modules later.

Cheers,
Nicolas

Comments

tryitonce’s picture

Thanks for posting this. Very generous and interesting. By saying thanks I also subsribe to this for future reference ;-)

Good luck ...

Summit’s picture

Hi Nicolas, thanks for sharing and wishing you a happy christmas and a great 2010!
Greetings, Martijn

toma’s picture

Good work, and i really happy to see all the modules release for free to the community, it will be great if all this good stuff be in some Install profile to learn how it can be used. Thanks for your great effort and work

Traphic’s picture

Thank you for making these available, the france24 website is a great example of what can done with drupal and these modules will become an invaluable part of my sites news and editorial features, plus I'm sure they will become widely used by the drupal community. Thanks and best wishes, I'm installing them now.

ikeizer’s picture

Excellent modules Nicolas, and very welcome for my own project. Especially uberimage could be very important to me, but I do have one question - it seems that, unlike with imagefield, there's no possibility to select an imagecache preset in Views. Am I missing something?

Thanks a lot for your contribution.

ndeschildre’s picture

Indeed in our case, we didn't need that: for each view row style we are using custom CCK nodereference formatters, with the Views CCK Formatter module we released.
For the image search View we have, we have created a CCK formatter that display the image, plus a View and Edit link.

There is another reason, a performance reason:
When you select a imagecachepreset in Views, in fact you are selecting a CCK formatter for this field.
And I really don't like generating CCK formatters automatically, since you may end up with a *huge* number of them, and all of their definition are transfered from the database to apache on each page loads. You add lightbox2, and you get even more of them (see http://drupal.org/node/614014)
With big setup with lots of imagecache presets, fields and so forth, we ended up with 1Gbits/s of data transfer between Mysql and Apache just because of the CCK formatters transmission :)

To create your own formatters, someone showed me http://drupal.org/project/custom_formatters, it may help.

ikeizer’s picture

Thanks for that info, I'm going to look into replacing the imagefield module with the AEF ones. It seems you formatter module will do the trick!

aac’s picture

Thanks for sharing this useful information!!!

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aac

macrodesign’s picture

thanks

hstefl’s picture

Really thanks!

Diecilab’s picture

Great work! Thanks.

jaron’s picture

Great set of modules. I'm trying to use node select in the way you show in your attached images, but I haven't found an "editor's toolbox" module anywhere. Is it listed under another name? Or are you planning on offering it?

Thanks.

zeezhao’s picture

Great Work. Thanks.

robydago’s picture

I'm testing the nodeselect module and so far I really like it.

Btw, where can I find the "Editor Toolbox" mentioned in the nodeselect readme.txt?

AndyF’s picture

I've just taken a look through them all and that's a fantastic addition to the Drupal community! Thanks so much!

ndeschildre’s picture

Thanks for the cheers!

"Editor toolbox" is this little floating window that you see on screenshots that contains Nodeselect (already opensourced) and a few others custom panels.

It's not open sourced yet because there is some little work to do to make it generic, and we're right now a bit busy, but that will come :)

knytphal’s picture

Very cool, thanks for releasing these! I remember reading the original article and have been waiting with baited breath the release of these modules. I know you said that you'll be releasing an article at some point in the future on combining these for use on a site, but I'm also wondering if you'll be combining them into either an installation profile or a feature? That would be cool as well.

Thanks again!

ndeschildre’s picture

Well, doing an installation profile or feature means to maintain it, and we have some parts that are a little touchy (right now we're using the old alpha content multigroup module), so that's not an easy task.

Doing an article going deeply on the use of the modules I think I'll do one day, maybe end of the month, I just need some free time :)

andrewblack’s picture

subscribing

mymy06’s picture

I follow your job very closely!
thank

yugi’s picture

Thanks! Good work, the modules seem very useful and we have started to use some of them in our projects.

jp2020’s picture

Great article.

Thanks,
JP

vuquochuy’s picture

This is useful post. I learnt a lot of information for deploy Drupal site. Thanks.