Content Management Systems

What happened in the world of Content Management Systems (CMS) last year?

Today we're going to explore Gravity Forms' form submission hook.

Gravity Forms is a WordPress forms plugin. It lets you visually create public-facing input forms, similar to Wufoo. You're able to build things like website surveys, event registrations, and (multi-step) payment processing forms.

Most Drupal developers are familiar with the Nodequeue module.

It gives developers the ability to set up groups of nodes, called "queues". Clients can add nodes to these groups, and use the drag-n-drop interface to order the nodes as desired. It gives clients a lot more control over which items should appear on certain parts of the site.

Having attended the last few U.S.-based DrupalCons, the upcoming Chicago event is easily the most exciting. Why is that? In a word, Drupal 7. Okay, maybe that's two words. Architecturally, it's a huge shift involving a new database layer, a new rendering layer, better form handling...the list goes on. And we're also reaping the fruits of all the user experience testing. Lots of good things to come.

If you're using Acquia Search or a self-hosted ApacheSolr search instance, you've already noticed that the default listing leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, it's not extremely difficult to make these results look exactly the way you want.

For starters, I'm assuming that Views 3 is already installed.

Create a new view

One of Drupal's strengths is in the ability of the Taxonomy module to handle hierachical categories. It makes lists like this easy:

Several battles have been brewing from within the WordPress community.

It's WordPress, not Wordpress dangit!

A couple weeks ago, a snippet of code got sneaked into WordPress 3.0. The function, capital_P_dangit, is a filter that replaces "Wordpress" with "WordPress" throughout one's site.

One thing becomes clear if you use Drupal for a while... the built-in search is poor. This isn't unexpected, as search is a a hard problem to solve. And the best way to get around hard problems is to find someone who has done it well and use their work.

Creating a plugin in WordPress is easier than you might think. There are currently over 8,500 plugins in the wordpress.org repository (not including paid plugins), so that should say something.

For starters, WordPress has a fairly extensive plugin API system, granting you the ability to hook into various parts of WordPress without needing to touch the core code directly.

This quick tutorial will demonstrate how you can set up your Drupal site to allow registered users to create custom themes which they can apply to other content items (nodes).