Starbow Consulting

Update: View all my BADCamp blog posts

I am really excited to be organizing a DrupalCamp at UC Berkeley. The institute I work at, CITRIS, is hosting BADCamp 07, the weekend of November 3rd and 4th: 9am to 5pm.

I have been getting lots of help from the members of the “Berkeley Drupal Users Group”, particularly Dan from CivicActions, Pete from OpenCircle Technology, and Chris from Alian Design.

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)

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.