I was busily working through the final stages of a site for a client this evening and was struck by the amount of small tweaks I needed to complete. The strength of Drupal, and one of it’s weaknesses, is the complexity and flexibility it provides. Sometimes just knowing which modules will do what you need and how they can work together can be daunting task for new Drupal site owners.

Most of my time was spent in small template and functionality changes that will mean the world to our client and their users. And that’s the way it should be. Most of all, I was simplifying the node creation and editing screens for the site’s ultimate users and editors. Drupal’s great, but most people have problems with the complex and confusing administration interface.

Many of our projects call on the same contributed modules; Views, CCK, Panels, Fusion theme etc. and we’ve become pretty slick and manipulating them so that when a client asks “Could we…”, the answer’s usually ”Yes!”.

But the very flexibility of core and contributed modules means that it’s very difficult for a Drupal novice to pick them up and configure them easily and quickly. Then you need to add on the permissions structure, roles and the complexities of theming. I’ve never come across a site we’ve completed without some degree of tweaking required.

When you hire a professional Drupal consultancy you get the experience and knowledge that comes from having come up against similar problems and already solved them. That allows your money to be well spent on building a robust, secure system and focussing on the user interface, architecture and experience. We also provide screen casts and simple, concise documentation to help with the everyday tasks that our customers perform themselves. Plus, when you have a really juicy requirement that’s not catered for by the myriad of contributed modules, we love to spend our time and effort getting that done just right.

…and here’s a screenshot showing the code in place

I could see from the output that there were 2 elements I was interested in, $args=$view->args['0'] (which held the cached view id) and $page=$view->pager['current_page'] (which held the current page the user was on, starting at 0). so far so good.

Next, I also needed a way to concatenate several fields into a table cell (as that was how the output was needed). I drushed Views custom field so that I could rewrite the output of a field with PHP. Custom field is like Views global text on steriods, highly recommended.
After a little more jiggery pokery getiing the other items I needed, I ended up with the following code in my custom field:
[php]
<?php
$view = views_get_current_view();
$args=$view->args['0'];
$page=$view->pager['current_page'];
$title=$data->node_title;
$loc=$data->location_city;
$contact=$data->node_data_field_result_set_id_field_contact_value;
$rectype=$data->node_data_field_result_set_id_field_record_type_value;
$recid=$data->node_data_field_result_set_id_field_record_id_value;
echo "<h3><a href=’/record/$rectype/$recid/$args/$page’>$title</a></h3>";
echo "<h4>$loc</h4>";
echo "<p>".htmlspecialchars_decode($data->node_revisions_body)."</p>";
echo "<span class=’contact’>$contact</span>";
?>
[/php]

As you can see, this takes some of the CCK node values, the node title, node body and views arguments and wraps them up in a url like this:
[code]
/record/[rec_id]/[rec_type]/[view_cache_id]/[current_page]
[/code]

Finally, I needed to adjust my custom module to accept the 2 new parameters (view_cache_id and current_page). Having done that I just had to add a link in my template – I’d already set the vlause to the variables $ref and $page.
[php]
echo "<div class=’back-to-search’><< Go back to <a href=’/dir?$ref&page=$page’><strong>your search results</strong></a></p>";
[/php]

All done, and a much better user experience as well.

We designed and built the site using WordPress, and provided client with WordPress training so they could update the site themselves.

We designed and built the site using WordPress. The site features a client login area for secure file downloads.

Design by Ronny Ellefsen @ tapelondon.co.uk

We provided design and custom development for this project.

It has been developed in partnership by Cheshire East Council, Central and Eastern Cheshire PCT, Age Concern Cheshire and Opportunity Links. DemenShare.com is supported by Efficiency and Transformation Capital funding from Local Government Improvement and Development.

The site was developed using Drupal and is hosted on Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure.

• nearly 400 specially commissioned articles on a variety of topics including technology, finance, expert advice and things to do
• a vibrant online community of bloggers
• user-generated groups
• image galleries
• an extensive events section with Google Maps integration and proximity searching

The site was built and launched in just 3 months and is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure.