Drupal

We've reached the last day of the calendar, and it's time for Santa's visit! Santa has been visiting some famous places all month. With the Geocoder module, Leaflet, a Geofield, and an Address field, you can automatically put each address Santa has visited on the map!

You do need to configure a geocoder source. We're using OpenStreetmap, from the geocoder-php/nominatim-provider.

When you allow the general Internet to post comments, or any other kind of content, you're inviting spam and abuse. We see far more spam comments than anything relevant or useful -- but when there is something relevant or useful, we want to hear it!

With the AI module and the Events, Conditions, and Actions module, you can set up automatic comment moderation.

Like any use of AI, setting an appropriate prompt is crucial to getting a decent result. Here's the one we're trying out:

One of the easiest things to do with the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module is to set values on fields. You can populate forms with names and addresses from a user's profile. You can set date values to offsets from the current time. You can perform calculations and store the result in a summary field, which can make using them in views much more straightforward.

We've had several clients working with memberships, who have a single name field with the full name of a person. And then they ask us to build a directory that is sorted by last name. This is a bit hard to do if there's a first name in front of it!

Names don't follow rules very well. Some have apostrophes in them, some have multiple words -- you can't just take the last word of a name and assume that's the last name, because often it just isn't.

Our Yacht Club client has three workslips that members can reserve for up to 3 days. Using core taxonomy, content types, views, and the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module, we built a system to allow members to make reservations, and have the system prevent double-bookings.

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.

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.