Urban Insight operates a highly successful on-demand video service, Planetizen Courses. The service keeps improving rapidly; it’s not uncommon for new features to appear on the site. One recent enhancement allows the system to keep track of progression in videos as they are being watched.
If you run your own website, it goes without saying that backing up your files and database is essential. Regularly doing a backup copy locally on the server might be adequate to avoid some kinds of disasters, but the best is to have an extra backup at a remote location. Amazon S3 is a perfect solution for this job. In this post, I will describe how to set up a Linux cron job to automatically back up your website and send a copy of the backup to S3 using the AWS command line interface (CLI).
Organic Groups is one of the most powerful social networking modules for Drupal. It allows users to maintain groups. The managers of these groups can control who can join, or post or view content in their groups.
Essentially, these groups can act as microsites inside the site; they have their own user list, content, and access control. For example, a football site might want to maintain groups for football teams, and post news and announcements that are relevant to the team in the team's group. The players would then join the OG group of their team. When players visit the group's page, they would see only that team's content (nodes, technically).
While working on a recent project, we found ourselves in a situation where we needed to customize a Views field in a way that was not possible using Views' configuration or theming. In such cases, writing a custom Views handler might be the best or only option.
Views is an essential part of any Drupal site. It is very versatile and allows non-developers to set up all kinds of listings of their content. However, no matter how versatile it is, you will always find a scenario that is not feasible to set up on its user interface. But if you are a developer, you have even more ways of manipulating views.