One downside of automating things is dealing with outages. Sometimes services go down, and are not available for some period of time. When this happens, how does it impact your automation?
If you don't design your automation carefully, you might lose the data entirely. Or get spammed by hundreds of submissions when it comes back up. Handling this correctly does end up needing some understanding of how the automation works, as well as any quirks of the remote system.
One of our e-commerce clients has several thousand active products. As a distributor, their clients are retailers, some of which like having an up-to-date product spreadsheet.
Using the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module along with a Views Data Export view of all products, we created a view of all the relevant fields that exports a spreadsheet of all their products, and saves it in their private media system once per day.
Drupal, with the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module can build up sophisticated applications without a single line of custom code. You can build full applications using a handful of Drupal modules.
The ECA Helper module provides an action to make an arbitrary HTTP post to any URL. That's all that's necessary to post to Mastodon from Drupal, if you have a Mastodon account. I've been using this functionality to automatically post these advent calendar posts for the past week.
Event Calendars seem to be very common on the Drupal sites we build. One of the best ways of improving engagement on a site is to add content about the event after it happens. People who attended an event might come back for a recap, or to see pictures or notes from other participants, while people who did not attend can get a sense of what a future event might be like based on your past events.
The saying goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: caching, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. While Drupal certainly has not solved the naming things, it has made a valiant attempt at a decent caching strategy. And for the most part it works great, allowing millions of lines of code to load up quickly the vast majority of the time.
This is more a tip about our favorite automation tool, the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module, and how it can get you out of a bind when Drupal caching goes too far.
Hot off the presses! A brand new module, AI Image Alt Text, uses your configured AI engine to write Alt text for your images, based on AI vision models. When you turn this on, you get a "Generate with AI" button next to image fields, where you can easily get AI to analyze your image and come up with alternative text.
With some quick tests, I'm finding it's describing the image better than I typically do.
Another automation we did for Programming Librarian, a site for librarians to plan educational programs, involved events. They wanted to always feature 3 events on the home page, and the most important events were in the future. If their schedule is full, they wanted 2 future and 1 past event visible -- but they don't always have upcoming events, so there might be 0, 1 or 2 future events, and 3, 2, or 1 past events.
Sometimes a simple reminder can spur a sale. If you have repeat customers that log into your commerce site, you may be able to remind them if they did not complete a checkout.
One of our clients is a yacht club that has their own moorage, which they lease out to members. With several hundred slips, their insurance requires them to maintain proof of insurance, up-to-date vessel registrations, and regular electrical inspections for all boats moored at their facility.
In Washington all vessel registrations renew in June, but insurance and inspections can expire any time of year. The office needs to keep copies of these documents on file.
Today, another automation using the Drupal #AI module -- automatically tag your articles.
With the AI module, its AI Automators submodule, and a provider configured, you can add an automation to any field. With a Tag field on your content, you can edit the field definition and "Enable AI Automator". Give it a reasonable prompt, and it will tag your content for you.
Like most of the AI integrations, the great thing is you can easily edit the tags later if you want to highlight something specific, or if it comes up with something inappropriate.
When you work on a team, it's useful to have notifications go to a chat room where you can coordinate any necessary action. Reviewing a comment before publishing, seeing stories as they are written, getting notified of new orders are the kinds of things we like having in a shared room.