I have put up a wiki with the current status of my work towards getting popup modal dialogs into Drupal 7 over at http://groups.drupal.org/node/9185

I just released a beta of my new experimental administration UI for the Drupal menu system, Quick Admin Menu. As opposed to my Ahah work, this interface is very client-side heavy, with only a couple of Ajax calls back to the system. This project is all about pushing the envelope in terms of ease of use.

Check out the demo. (You will not be able to submit the changes, or use the “Add item to Menu” link)

Just got bit by a weird Firebug issue. If you have a variable named “parent”, Firebug will choke. The second time you load the page, you will get lots of “console is undefined” errors, and there is nothing for it, but to rename the variable and restart the browser. I still think FB is the best thing since sliced bread.

Thanks to Mike over at the Firebug forum for diagnosing this one:
http://groups.google.com/group/firebug/browse_thread/thread/54df1cf07e77...

Damn, just lost my first version of this post. I need to see about getting the autosave module working

I am working to wrap my brain around Drag & Drop in Drupal. Interface, the jQuery UI plug-in, seems like the best place to start. I am using jjeff’s expiremental jQuery Update modules so I can use the latest version (v1.2).

Kent Bye, of the echochamberproject.com, has posted a step-by-step analysis of how ahah_forms.js does it’s voodoo. Check it out at: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dczgjp36_48ctkpt3

This article is a follow up to my first tutorial on the subject: A Dynamically Expanding AJAX/AHAH Drupal Form Element. The basic flow of that article is still correct, but two month ago I could not figure out how to do dynamic forms without grabbing what I needed out of $_POST, which removes all the great FAPI security. Now I have figured it out and present the dynamic_subform module in Ahah Forms v1.5, which provides functions for securely creating and updating dynamic forms and subforms.

Update: The demo site is currently resting. It might return in the future.

You can try out demos of the examples in the Ahah Forms package (Dynamic Polls, Views and Todo Lists) over at: http://demo.starbowconsulting.com.

Wow, the Summit was quite something. My head is still spinning from all the new info. I think my session went really well. Got some good questions, and feedback. Still need to figure out how to do the dynamic forms thing without opening up a security hole. More on that soon. Until then here are my slides:

Let’s start with a review for those who have not already drunk the ahah forms framework kool-aid: Ahah forms is a utility for attaching Ajax-style partial page loading to Drupal forms without having to code any javascript. This is similar to Ruby on Rails’ link_to_remote tag or form_remote_tag() function. The method I use to declare the binding is a custom extension to the formAPI.

Stepping up to the plate

Back to our story of Ajax vs the Drupal Form API. After modifying poll.module to work with ahah_forms in a couple of hours, I was feeling cocky, and decided to go for the gold ring: Views. I use views a lot and think it is one of the key drupal modules.  And it is the perfect target for Ajax, because creating a View can take over a dozen page refreshes.  I went in optimistic.  If you read my first post on this topic (http://starbowconsulting.com/blog/tao/dynamically-expanding-ajax-ahah-dr…)
you will remember that the hardest part of the process is getting your dynamic form to work without JavaScript, and views_ui already had that nailed.  At the end of my first day’s work I thought I was 90% of the way there.  At the end of my second day, I knew I was in trouble.

Update:I have just released version 1.3 of ahah_forms, which includes a significantly simplified version of views_ui.module-example.  I realized that since I was not able to accomplish my goal of per-section form processing, I can limit most of my changes to the theming functions. Most of the discussion below is still valid.