Darren Mothersele

I had hoped my next post was going to be the long awaited screencast on jQuery UI and drag and drop. I've even recorded most of it, but I just haven't found time to finish editing it. It will come soon I promise! In the meantime, here's a quick note on using Contextual Links. These are a handy admin tool in Drupal 7. They provide a quick way to access all the key important admin tasks right from the front end of the website. Loads of modules provide them, including core's block module, menu module, and contrib modules like Views. On a recent theme implementation it made more sense to provide the usual 'edit', 'moderate', etc tabs via Contextual Link rather than the standard page tabs. Code to do this follows after the break:

I had a collection of database dumps from a server that had been created using MySQL's --all-databases option. This contained the databases for several Drupal websites, but I wanted to restore the Drupal database for just one of the sites. After a bit of Googling I came across two simple solutions:

Another great Drupal London event last night!

Chris (matason on Drupal.org) gave a great presentation of the new Drupal 7 Workbench module. It was great to see it in action and one I can see using myself a lot in the future. John and Rob demonstrated their Survey Builder module, a new backend for the excellent Form Builder tool. This looks like it has a lot of potential, so one to keep an eye on for the future I think. Vamory gave a really useful guide to making multi-step forms in FAPI, and then I got to talk about one of my pet favourite subjects, jQuery!

I showed the Active Tags module, and demonstrated adding some of the jQuery UI widgets to a Drupal 7 site, then showed how to build up a more complex interaction by adding Drag and Drop functionality to a couple of Drupal Views, then hooking up a Rules backend linked together by Page Manager. In case you missed it, or wanted more details, read on...

There's one last Drupal London event before the end of the year. It's being held at Cap Gemini and more details are here on the Event Brite page. The meeting will be about Drupal Forms, and I will be presenting on the using jQuery and jQuery UI with Drupal Forms. I'll will post up the slides in advance, and I think the presentations will be streamed online. The Drupal meetups are always a lot of fun and a good place to meet other Drupal developers and users. See you there!

There are several approaches to integrating Drupal with Facebook, the most active modules being Facebook Connect and Drupal for Facebook. I've been playing around with a slightly different approach that interacts with the Graph API using the Feeds and Rules modules. Read on for more details...

I recently attended a Hack Day hosted by Kasabi and BrightLemon on Open Government data and semantic web. We played around with the Kasabi services, and the available datasets. During the day I quickly put together a Drupal 7 website to demonstrate querying a Kasabi SPARQL endpoint using Drupal and SPARQL Views. If you've not already done so, head over to the Kasabi beta and register for an API key and find an interesting dataset you want to use. Read on for full details of how to set up a Drupal site to talk to the Kasabi services...

Import content from other webpages using Feeds and some HTML DOM magic. I've created this module, as importing HTML content is a task that comes up now and again, and I wanted a more generic way of doing it. This is useful for many things, including monitoring sites that don't support RSS, importing legacy content to a Drupal site, screen scraping, etc. To do this I've created a module called SimpleHTMLDOM Parser and published it on Drupal.org. Read on for documentation...

Drupalcon has sold out. In a week's time London will be overflowing with Drupalers. Come along and meet us on the Drupal pub crawl. More information here: http://ubelly.com/drupalconpubcrawl/

Have you set up and tested your Git identification yet? You've got a few days left to do this, next week will be too late! For full details check the recent email to the Drupal maintainers mailing list. Looking forward to a new era of Drupal development using Git!

You probably know, it's out!, and it's awesome. We're having a party tonight at Microsoft. See you there.