module | Cryptic Zone

August 1, 2016

Slack Chat: Chatting with Visitors on a Drupal Site

Since we switched to Slack as the primary means of communication at work, Slack has grown to be my favorite chat application. Not only does it have a very pleasant interface, but it also offers great ways to integrate it with your application. As a matter of fact, their API is among the least restrictive ones in my experience. As a result of the joy of working the Slack API, Slack chat module was born to serve as a proof of concept for embedded Drupal-to-Slack chat functionality.

June 28, 2016

Extending Drupal's Node.js Integration

The Node.js integration Drupal module offers an API that allows developers to add real-time push notification functionality to their modules. Real-time communication could enable features like chat, pop-up notifications, or real-time content update. Chatroom is a great example of how a module can leverage Node.js.

June 15, 2016

Customer Chat: Live Customer Support for Drupal

E-commerce sites are more and more commonly offering live chat for their visitors as a way of customer support. There is a wide selection of modules for Drupal that can add this functionality. However, most, if not all, I found rely on third party chat services. A while ago, I decided to build a native live chat module in connection with a project of mine. The module has been released as Customer chat.

December 15, 2015

Encrypting Sensitive Data in Drupal Node Fields

Although not typical, it is an occasional necessity to store sensitive data in a website in such a way that it is reasonably well protected from prying eyes. On a recent project, we needed to implement a method for content editors to encrypt some parts of the nodes' content.

Read the article at Urban Insight...

August 19, 2015

Building a Configuration Form for a Custom Panels Plugin

In my previous post, we built a custom Panels plugin that shows a node status icon to indicate whether the node is published or unpublished. This time around, we will enhance that plugin by introducing a configuration form. For the sake of demonstration, we will add a setting that lets the user choose when they want the show the status icon: only when the node is unpublished, or always.