CRMs, Databases

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.

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 has long had a variety of access control modules, to make it so you can easily control who can view or edit particular pages. There are actually several different layers of APIs to control this in Drupal core -- the modules generally provide a user interface to let you control access by content type, by tagging content with particular terms, through their position on a menu, or through a group. The Field Permissions module lets you control access to particular fields on an entity.

One of our clients is an art gallery that has a daily light show with limited seating. Reservations are free, but the show is popular enough that you need to reserve a month out.

Each day, they print a list of reservations for the staff to use when admitting guests.

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.