A blog about web development and Drupal.
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. Using Slack chat module, you can add a chat widget to your Drupal site that your visitors can use to chat with…
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. What does Node.js integration do? When a visitor opens a page on which the Node.js module is enabled, the client-side JavaScript opens a socket connection between the visitor's browser and the Node.js server. The Node.js server runs the drupal-nodejs application that communicates…
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. The primary interface of Customer chat module is a dashboard that site agents can use to accept incoming chats from visitors. This page shows all the active chats that are relevant to the…
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.
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post, we built a custom Panels plugin that shows a node status icon to indicate whether the node is published or unpublished.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we will add a setting that lets the user choose when they want the show the status icon: only when the node is unpublished, or always. As one might expect, we will need to use Drupal's From API to define the configuration options. First, we need to tell Panels which function to call when it shows the configuration form. This can be done by…