module

I've had a couple projects that needed the menu system to stay open when a full node was being displayed. The Drupal menu system, while dynamic and mostly awesome, didn't seem to allow for that, at least not in the way that I needed it to. So, I wrote Automenu.

For each content type, Automenu allows an administrator to set a default parent in the menu system. If a node is given an entry in the menu system, that default parent is ignored. Relatively simple.

To illustrate, let's say you'd like all nodes of type 'news' to show up under an entry in Primary links called 'Newsroom,' but you don't want to actually create an entry in the menu system for each one. Automenu will do that for you, specifically without creating additional entries in the menu system. If you want to give an individual news node its own special place in the menu system, you can still do that the standard way.

Give it a shot!

Thanks to merlinofchaos and the folks in the #drupal IRC channel for steering me in the right direction on this. They're a bunch of great and helpful folks.

Some of you may remember opensource.echoditto.com, EchoDitto's lately-neglected repository of free software. We've had turnover both in staff and Drupal versions since the last time we paid serious attention to it. One of the goals of this labs project is to migrate that software over.

Much of it hasn't been ported to Drupal 5 — and most of it shouldn't be. Webform makes echoinvite unncessary; askismet and the spam module encompass the capabilities of blacklist.

But we've still got a few useful tricks up our sleeves — and now have some new and improved, Drupal 4.7 and 5 versions of "classic" EchoDitto modules.

So, first up: EchoDump. This is an awfully simple module, but also an awfully useful one — at least in my experience. If you're maintaining a Drupal site for a client that expects regular reports but isn't capable of wrangling with SQL, this can greatly simplify your life. It allows you to create SQL reports that can be exposed on a granular basis to users. And it features easy exporting to Excel, making the creation of "user signups over time" graphs and the like a relatively painless process.

As you might expect, you'll want to be very careful about which users you grant the right to enter SQL.

Also, please note that although the 4.7 version has been used on production websites, I just adapted it to 5.0 for this post. Please consider it beta software, and use it with care.