Ayman Hourieh's Blog

Update On Drag/Drop Portal Interface for Drupal

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article on creating a drag/drop portal interface with Drupal and Script.aculo.us. Many comments were interested in a jQuery port for Drupal 5.0, and Mark recommended building such a module on top of the brilliant Panels module. I finally had time to continue working on this, so I created an initial drag/drop module built on top of jQuery and Panels. It's far from complete (doesn't save user settings for example), but it's step in the right direction. I also posted an issue to Panels' tracker, pinging merlinofchaos (author of panels), so let's take the discussion there.

I really am looking forward to polishing this module, as I believe it'll be a timely addition to Drupal's arsenal of modules, now that jQuery is part of Core and Drupal 5.0 is around the corner.

You may download the module here. It's only meant to demonstrate functionality. It's for Drupal 4.7 (because Panels hasn't been ported to 5.0 yet), and requires Panels module. To use it, try to add a new panel and you will find a new type called "three column with drag-and-drop". I tested it with bluemarine; it may not work with other themes for reasons outlined in the issue I posted.

9 JavaScript Tips You May Not Know

JavaScript is a fully-featured Object-Oriented programming language. On the surface, it shares syntactical similarities with Java and C, but the mentality is quite different. At its core, JavaScript is more similar to functional languages. Inside is a list of JavaScript tips, some offer techniques to simulate features found in C-like languages (such as assertions or static variables). Others are meant to improve performance and explore some of the more obscure parts of the web scripting language.

Read more

Drag/Drop Portal Interface With Scriptaculous And Drupal

Update: I posted some news on this here.

Ever wondered how to create an interface like Google Personalized Home? In the first section of this article I'll demonstrate how to create a drag/drop portal in a few lines of JavaScript code, using the excellent Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries. In the second section, I'll explain how to integrate this code into Drupal as a server backend for storing user settings. You may check the frontend here (tested with Firefox 1.5, IE6, and Opera 8.5), and download a reusable JavaScript Portal class and Drupal module for the backend at the bottom of this post.

Read more