The WGBH.org Development Blog

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July! I had what I would call a successful 4th - I didn’t lose a single digit! All the better to build the new WGBH.org with, I say!

This week we are getting ready for some full blown functional testing. Our project manager Louise is busy assembling the testing team and working up a testing plan. I’m busy writing up user documentation for the TV Programs and Schedules module, which I’ll use as a basis for a training session this week for the testers. This documentation will get posted on the WGBH Online wiki where the whole team can access it and modify it. I mean, really, who doesn’t love a wiki?

I thought I’d take the time now to give you a peek at some of the contributed modules that we’re currently using for the TV programs and schedules module.

First up, CCK! We have multiple custom content types, including TV Programs, TV Episodes, TV Airings, and Content Boxes.

We make use of the Date module for setting airing dates for TV programs and generating schedules.

The Devel module is vital for use during, well, development.

We use the FeedAPI module for importing our TV program and schedule data, which we get from PBS as an XML feed. Note that we use the SimplePie parser.

The Image and Image Assist modules allow us to upload, find and reuse images in the most straightforward way. The Image module will also generate thumbnails and preview versions of images at upload time.

We use a number of other contributed modules along the way. Since we use CVS to download core Drupal and contributed module code we use the CVS Deploy module helps us to keep track up of new releases. The Pathauto module automatically generates URL aliases for our nodes, according to patterns we define. Porter-Stemmer and ReIndex modules are used for search. The Scheduler module allows us to schedule node content for future publication or expiration and TinyMCE gives us a nice WYSIWYG editor for textareas.

Finally, we couldn’t do much without Views and we’ve also developed two custom modules of our own, the WGBH TV Schedules module for handling the bulk of the custom programs and schedules code and the WGBH TV Search module for some custom search functionality.

You can also see the various states of completion of these modules. We’re still working with a bunch of alpha/beta versions here. As they say, it’s not for the faint of heart…

No doubt this list will continue to grow over time. Here’s a big shout out to all of you who develop and maintain these contributed modules. This is what makes an application like Drupal so useful to so many. Go ahead - take a bow - and keep up the good work!