There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

Web applications are changing. Whereas most of the processing used to happen on the server, the current generation of browsers is capable of performing non-trivial tasks via the increasingly powerful HTML5 + JavaScript environment. Drupal, however, is still a server-heavy platform where JavaScript is used mostly as user interface candy.

I wrote last time about the latest developments to my Views Auto-Refresh module, which periodically refreshes a Views page, either by reloading the whole view, or by incrementally inserting new items only. It's a useful tool for activity streams and other Twitter-like, real-time lists.

Still, I had a nagging feeling that my code was endangering the server. Consider this: every 15 seconds, each connected browser invokes a full Drupal bootstrap plus a full View render, just to ask the server if there are new items.

Imagine you are creating an activity stream for your site. You'd like to use Views because it gives you all the power you need to query items and style them on the page - all in time for your 11am nap. However, the resulting page is static and users have to keep refreshing it manually to see updates. In 2011, that's just uncool.

That's why I created Views Auto-Refresh, a Views Hacks sub-module that implements an auto-refreshing mechanism that integrates right into Views 2 or 3.

I've been a lazy adopter of Drupal 7. I admit it, mea culpa, but I'll leave this discussion to another post. What happened in the mean time is that VBO for D7 languished for a year or so in a zombie state until it was rescued in early May by Bojan Živanović, bojanz on d.o. He started out by announcing a sandbox project containing his code, and a few days later, I was convinced that this was the way to go for VBO on D7.

As a Web developer, I spend most of my time rendering lists of objects to HTML, formatted in every imaginable way. Fortunately for us Drupal heads, the Views module exists just to make this task easier - this is in fact my standard introduction to my "Views for hackers" talk.

One common scenario that I've encountered, and about which I was asked several times, is how to reuse Views to render a pre-defined list of objects - i.e., a list that already exists without the need for an SQL query. Why would anyone want to use Views in that case?

I gave my "Views for hackers" talk at DrupalCon Chicago yesterday. This was definitely the biggest attendance I've ever had in my short experience as a speaker! Thanks everyone for attending and for the great questions. Please rate it at the DrupalCon site, this will help me improve it.

Taxonomy is a very powerful classification system, so powerful in fact that it's hard (and resource intensive) to fully utilize it in Views and other queries.

I gave my "Views for Hackers" presentation at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group (aka Vancouver League of Drupalers). This is an updated version from the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit earlier this month. Roland Tanglao filmed it and posted it on Qik - thanks Roland!

Here's a short recipe to sort the results of a view using PHP. The domain of application is sorting feeds in Managing News based on the number of items each feed has.

I gave a talk about programming Views at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2010.