TimOnWeb

Hi everyone, hope some of you had/having a great time at DrupalCon Portland. Since I could go I decided to do something useful and apply to Dropbucket Drupal Snippets Repository some new ideas I had in my mind. Long story short, last night I rolled out an update which brought the follwing:

"How to find form id in Drupal" is one of the most popular questions, especially for the beginners.

More experienced developers know that to find form id you need to either look into the DOM source code or to create your own hook_form_alter() function like this:

function YOUR_MODULE_NAME_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
  dpm($form_id);
}

On 13th - 14th of April 2013 in Wrocław (c'mon, pronounce it, you can: vrɒtswəf) will be held the second in history Polish Drupal Camp (http://dcwroc.pl/). Drupal scene in Poland is still relativelly small, but for sure is very promissing. Three years ago I moved to Poland and almost no one I met knew a thing about Drupal. Today Drupal is pretty much visible here, with big projects based on Drupal (including the official website of Polish Prime Minister) and increasing demand for the talent the number of which is still scarse.

Yes, you read it right! Now you can create personal lists of Drupal snippets at Dropbucket.org - Drupal snippets repository. It turned out that we already have loads of great snippets at the website and there challenge have appeared: how to group these snippets in some convenient way? So for example, you found five cool snippets about theming and you could add them to your bookmarks, but later, you can lose track of them because you're constantly adding other snippets to your bookmarks and sooner or later you can simply get lost in your bookmarks feed.

Today I want to share with you 8 great Drupal snippets that blew my mind. I found these browsing Dropbucket.org - Drupal snippets repository. There are lots of cool Drupal snippets being shared and stored at dropbucket.org but I found these to be the most new and interesting to me. I do really wish I knew about before. But Drupal is full of surprises and there are loads of tricks which don't know about, even if you've spent lots of years working with The Big Drop :) Okay, let's start. Snippets aren't sorted in any order of preference:

A week ago I've announced a project which I created in order to fullfill my own need of storing Drupal snippets - Dropbucket.org. I've announced this project here on my blog and it turned out to be a huge success attracting lots of eyes, positive responses, thanks, clicks, tweets and registrations. I'm really amazed by reactions I received and today I decided to sum up the first week of life of the Dropbucket.org.

I've been doing Drupal for last six or seven years and tried lots of ways of storing snippets. I used internal capabilities of IDE's (like snippets in Eclipse or code templates in Netbeans), I stored them in notepad, evernote, used lots of different downloadable snippet managers and stuff.

But there always were two needs which I couldn't satisfy with these approaches: I wanted snippets to be stored online (so I didn't lost them when I format my HDD or uninstall IDE) and I wanted to share my drupal snippets in a dedicated place, where drupalers gather.

We Drupal people, we love to share, this is in our blood and this is an underlying power which drives Drupal community, do something and share with others! So why not to share with our snippets? I believe every of us has loads of different chunks of code which we use on a daily basis, we need to store them, we need to share them. That's why I created dropbucket.org - Drupal snippets repository, a place where you can put your little drops of drupal code and fill the snippet bucket.

This post is a quick addition to my previous tutorial: Loading Only One Field From An Entity or Node in Drupal 7. The tricky part there was what to do with node's field data and how to properly display it? Well there are lots of approaches there, but I see three which are of “Drupal Way” kind:

Time from time, while doing your custom Drupal code, you may want to load only one or several specific fields from a defined set of entities. So actually you have three approaches to this:

1. Query for entity/node set and load whole entities to get desired fields data. Works, but not a performant solution.

2. Make a direct sql query and get desired fields out of your database. Works too, is the fasted in terms of performance solution, but not too flexible and portable.

3. Leverage EntityFieldQuery() and field_attach_load(). This approach is not as fast as the second, but way more faster than loading whole nodes, it is flexible and uses field caching mechanism. If you'll decide to change your database backend later in the future, let's say to MongoDB, you'll be able to switch without changing a line in your code, neat!

I’ve been using menu position module (http://drupal.org/project/menu_position) for some time and this is a really handy module I must say. It lets you set an active menu item based on different conditions. For example: you want products menu item to be set as active while you’re browsing nodes of content type “Products”.