ImageX Blog: Posts in January 2012

Services Single Sign-On Client

Services Single Sign-on Client

The beauty of single sign-on (SSO) user authentication is that users to have one username and one password to access numerous sites, systems and computers. This is beneficial for larger organizations as it eliminates the need for multiple user names and passwords for multiple sites and sub-sites. The current Drupal SSO solution is the share tables across instances module but it is not recommended due to issues with broken version updates and security holes. This module requires that all sites and sub-sites are on the same servers. But what if they aren’t?

Top Ten Drupal Modules and Themes of 2011

1. Display Suite
DS lets you customize the output of nodes and their content fields without having to modify template files. Even clients can drag and drop fields and change how they display and are formatted. If only life were this easy!

Ben – Best thing that happened to Drupal since CCK.
Brandon – More ‘Drupal-way’ than panels.
Trent – With the pulling the node and view layout changes out of the template files, we are able to make changes to sites without having to have your desktop or laptop on hand, making Drupal content layout almost completely editable on a mobile device like an iPad or phone.
John – Powerful and versatile, and very intuitive. It’s easy for a developer to incorporate it into their workflow, and before long it’ll look like the solution to almost any problem.

Custom Contextual Links Module

In the Drupal community the phrase “There’s a module for that” is pretty much synonymous with Apple’s “There’s an app for that”. So it was a bit surprising when Trent, ImageX’s ‘walking module encyclopedia’, mentioned the lack of an existing module allowing developers to add links to the contextual links widgets in Drupal 7.

There are a number of Drupal 6 modules that create a nice shortcut to edit/delete a node or to configure a block without actually clicking through the entire menu structure. Developers that used any of these modules immediately added them to their own personal ‘must install’ module lists and as a result, and much to the delight of the community, this became a core feature in Drupal 7.

On it’s own the core module adds contextual link widgets to nodes and blocks and there are a number of modules that add their own links as well.