Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.
Drag and drop and AJAXy, but degrades too! No need for JavaScript required.
Overview
The Form builder project reads and modifies Forms API arrays. Using a well-known data-structure that most Drupal developers are familiar with should make for low barrier to entry for utilizing the new module.
The project uses a AJAX-based interface for updating form elements. As you modify properties such as "Title" or "Description", Form builder makes requests in the background to update the element through Drupal's internal FAPI system. The user gets a live preview of their changes without saving the form. This approach means that no additional JavaScript needs to be written by implementing modules, since the rendering is done in PHP and then sent to the client as needed.
Demo
Enough talk, go try out the demo and see it in action.
This videocast covers three modules, wrapped together to provide a flexible solution for displaying information about content ratings in a list.
VotingAPI: Central storage of votes and rating information.
Fivestar: A flexible widget for registering votes on a 1-10 star basis.
Views: The ultimate Drupal query builder, capable of pulling out lists of information from the database.
In Drupal 6, the options in configuring views has become drastically more complex. This videocast helps understand how to setup views that display information about the current average rating for piece of content and also how to pull in an individual users results, each displayed as Fivestar widgets.
Nate Haug adds a dash of design to Lullabot. He received degrees in both a Fine Arts and Computer Science from Truman State University, creating the perfect bridge between the technical and aesthetic. Detail is his obsession, so if you know what you want, Nate will deliver your desire.
Nate joined Drupal development in 2005, discovering his development times cut by a quarter, then a half, then even more. Amazed and then addicted to the rapid development of sites using Drupal, Nate dedicated himself to the development of quality Drupal modules and user support. He quickly picked up development on several major contrib modules, including the ever-popular webform module.
Nate began providing additional programming muscle for Lullabot in May 2006 then later joined the team that September. He played a significant part of the MTV UK Drupal launch, and is working on a lot of cool things that he can't yet mention.
In his spare time Nate enjoys various forms of painting, prints, and drawing, but often finds himself immersed in the latest web design trends and mucking around in Photoshop. You can meet Nate in the Drupal forums or groups discussions as quicksketch.
Lullabot is proud to present a completely original, completely free iconset: Lullacons Pack 1!
The Iconset
Lullacons Pack 1 includes 113 icons. These general purpose icons fill a basic need in the Drupal (and the open-source community) for visual reinforcement of textual content. Though we intend to use these in Drupal, feel free to use them in any project!
Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Oh yeah, and they're using Drupal.
With the need to create company profiles containing large subsets of data and intricate relationships between content and still perform well under high traffic conditions, it was obvious Drupal was needed for this task. From community moderated content to dynamic bar-graph generation, BuyBlue.org is a compelling and informative web system.
Lullabot has partnered with MTV Networks UK & Ireland to provide back-end support and management to the newly updated mtv.co.uk consumer website. Using Drupal technology the site will continue to host news and information for all of MTV UK's current broadcast channels but will provide an enhanced user experience through use of Drupal’s community ready core functionality.
Leo Laporte is probably most recognized as the host of the television shows The Screen Savers or Call for Help. He was also a pioneering podcaster with his podcast This Week in Tech (a.k.a. TWiT), which has long been one of the most popular podcasts on the net.
Leo wanted to expand TWiT into an entire network of podcasts and he approached Lullabot about building his new site using Drupal. We helped Leo put together a very flexible installation of Drupal designed to expand with his network. TWiT.tv is now the hub for the more than 14 podcasts in the TWiT network.
Rhonda Britten is a life coach and the star of the daytime reality television show "Starting Over". Her web site tests the limits of Drupal with extensive features such as paid memberships giving access to private content, member discounts, workshop purchases, downloadable e-books, message boards, and mailing lists. Development of this site contributed over 10 new modules into the Drupal repository.
Participant Productions is a film company whose mandate is "to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all". They wanted a way to encourage their audiences to "participate" in the issues surrounding their films and the result is www.participate.net, a highly customized Drupal site where every visitor can become a user, and every user can have their own blog. Celebrity bloggers include the film's directors, actors, writers, producers, and known public figures involved in the issues. The site also offers "action" items and incentives such as giveaways and a Participant of the Month.
