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The Future of Form Building in Drupal (it's here!)
December 3, 2008
Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.
Drag and drop and AJAXy, but degrades too! No need for JavaScript required.
Overview
The Form builder project reads and modifies Form API arrays. Using a well-known data-structure that most Drupal developers are familiar with should make for low barrier to entry for utilizing the new module.
The project uses a AJAX-based interface for updating form elements. As you modify properties such as "Title" or "Description", Form builder makes requests in the background to update the element through Drupal's internal FAPI system. The user gets a live preview of their changes without saving the form. This approach means that no additional JavaScript needs to be written by implementing modules, since the rendering is done in PHP and then sent to the client as needed.
Demo
Enough talk, go try out the demo and see it in action.
Implementing Form Builder
read more »For those who were wondering...
October 16, 2008
People have been asking for more information about our new venture. More detailed information is forthcoming, but meanwhile, I did a press round-up for those of you who might be interested. We're working on a press page for Lullabot.com, but meanwhile, I thought I'd post it to our blog.
Paid Content
Media Bistro
Newspaper Association of America
And of course, there are a couple of great articles about here on Lullabot.com:
Edward Sussman: Why Start (Up) Now?
Jeff Eaton: Power to the People
Updated:
My own personal post about this is here
Edward Sussman: Why Start (Up) Now?
October 14, 2008
With our recent announcement of our new venture, the web has been abuzz with speculation. What follows is a guest blog post by Ed Sussman who visits lullabot.com to help shed some light on the situation. If you'd like to reach Ed, contact him at emsussman@gmail.com
read more »Reprint of "Power to the people: a new approach to Drupal"
October 13, 2008
This is a reprint of a blog post that Jeff Eaton put up on his blog. It seems to sum up many of our interests and intentions with our new venture. We wanted to be sure that no one missed it, so we're reposting it here. -j.r.
Late Friday afternoon, the first news broke about a project that I've been working on for the last couple of months. Internally, the Lullabot folks have been calling it "Project Codename," because we like recursively cheeky names. The goal is pretty ambitious: build a dirt-simple hosted service that lets people with great ideas leverage the power of Drupal.
For the past couple of months, a lot of cool things have already come out of the project for the Drupal community, though we haven't been able to say much about what was going on behind the curtain. SimpleViews, my new task-oriented front-end for the Views module, is one example. Rather than constructing content listings bit by bit, it lets site-builders make a few simple choices and get quick results. Nate Haug has been building similar tools for the CCK module; Angie Byron has been working with user experience experts to streamline Drupal's administrative interface; and Jeff Robbins has been hard at work on some amazing tools that allow site builders to customize a site's layout and CSS skins with point-and-click, drag-and-drop simplicity. Subtler stuff, like John VanDyk's recent improvements to the Views Bulk Operations module, have grown out of the tools we're building for simple, customizable administration panels.
read more »SimpleViews: The demo
September 26, 2008
I've mentioned the SimpleViews module a few times over the past couple of weeks, hinting that it would be cool and -- perhaps -- cure cancer or help over-leveraged investment banks. I can't promise too much, but the first version of it has hit Drupal.org, and I filmed a short demo to show off what it does.
SimpleViews has been a fun project for me, in part because it grew out of a need for a current client project. The site needs to give inexperienced admins the ability to build simple listing pages of different kinds of content -- the stuff Views is perfect for -- but can't overwhelm them with the kind of power-tools Views UI offers. Voila! SimpleViews.
Enjoy!
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