development

Earlier this year we supported the IxDA in launching a new version of their IxDA.org site. One of the many interesting new features of this site is the ability to sort content by "hotness". The goal of this tool is to create a list of interesting content on the site. Their analytics show them that most people who are involved in the site visit it at least twice a month. So, they wanted a system to highlight content over the last two to three weeks. Enter the radioactivity module.

Radioactivity Module for Drupal

The Radioactivity module works on the concept of adding energy to a piece of content which then "decays" (or diminishes) with a particular half-life. The exact behavior is up to the site administrator, but on IxDA.org we originally set it up with values roughly similar to:

• Posting content adds a lot of energy so that the hotness favors recent items.
• Commenting on a post adds some energy
• Voting up adds a bit of energy, voting down subtracts some energy
• Favoriting a post adds some energy as well

We've got a few other elements that affect energy to help offset any potential gaming.

We set the half-life for decay to 15 days. So, if a piece of content gets posted and 3 comments and 2 vote ups and 1 favorite with 100 views on the first day it will have about 500 units of energy. If it gets no new energy, it would decay down to 250 units of energy after 15 days, and then down to 125 after 30 days and so on. Eventually the energy and decay are really small and for efficiency the module simply deletes all records with less than 2 units of energy.

There seems to be a new pattern emerging in Drupal and I want to let you know that the Token module has joined the bandwagon with a "Token Starter Kit"

History of the Starter Kit in Drupal: Zen Theming

When the Zen project started it's goal was to be a really solid base HTML theme with tons of comments in the templates so that a new themer could take it, modify it, and end up with a great theme. Unfortunately, that second step of modifying it meant that people ran into all sorts of support issues that were hard to debug and they were in trouble when a new version of Zen came out - they weren't really running Zen any more.

How to use the Token Starter Kit

The Token Starter Kit is meant to be similarly easy for folks to use. The idea is that if you just open up the token module itself and start adding tokens then you are "hacking a contrib" (modifying it) and you will have to remember to make those changes again when you upgrade. Bad news. It's also not particularly simple to understand how the module works (it's got includes, and hooks, oh my!).

Enter the tokenSTARTER module. Just copy the tokenSTARTER .info and .module files to a new directory in your modules directory, rename them, and rename all the functions inside to match the filenames. This gives you a clean place to start adding in your own tokens. So, go for it. You'll see that it's quite simple and all you need are two hooks.

Documentation on Token API

There's also an API.txt file and README.txt file which explain how to write tokens in general. Lots of great advice in there.

The Growing Venture Solutions team has expanded over the last 6 months to add two new members. In the face of increasing demand for our services we are now looking to hire new people to join the team.

We are hiring two people. These descriptions are for the ideal candidate, so if you have some of the qualities and are looking to expand in these areas then please still contact us.

Website Designer With a Strong Usability Focus

Most of our projects are heavy on development, but our goal is to be a full service shop. We've satisfied this need so far by working with contractors, but now we want someone to join the team. One of your tasks will be to help polish our site (we've started work on this, but it would be unfair to keep you out of it). You'll also work with our clients on identity, user experience, and wireframing. And if you're interested you will help with some sales work.

Drupal Generalist: Site Builder, Developer, Support Engineer, Trainer

EDIT: This position is now filled.

We provide many services around Drupal: building sites, writing custom code and enhancing modules, providing support to our support clients, and providing training services. If you are a "Drupal generalist" interested in providing at least some of these services that's great. A resume is less interesting than a solid record of contribution to the Drupal project - please provide a link to your drupal.org user profile.

Locations and What it's like to work with Growing Venture Solutions

We like to think we're a pretty special company. The best way to describe us is a hybrid between being a freelancer and an employee. For more details, see this description.

We recently helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing I did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. I posted a summary of my research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so I set to work building a new module.