The Gateway to 21st Century Skills (www.thegateway.org) is a semantic web enabled digital library that contains thousands of educational resources and as one of the oldest digital libraries on the web, it serves educators in 178 countries. Since 1996, educational activities, lesson plans, online projects, and assessment items have been contributed and vetted by over 700 quality organizations.

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Create the custom autocomplete field using the custom module.
How to create a custom autocomplete form and to get the user names or or anything else?
Here is the example.
/**
*Implementation of hook_menu().
*/

$items['custom_automplete_form'] = array(
'title' => 'Custom autocomplete form',
'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
'page arguments' => array('custom_autocomplete_form'),
'access arguments' => array('access autocomplete'),
'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM
);
/**
*Implementation of function custom_autocomplete_form()
*/ Read more »

About thegateway.org:

The Gateway has been serving teachers continuously since 1996 which makes it one of the oldest publically accessible U.S. repositories of education resources on the Web. The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items.

The older version of the website was on plone. The team hired us to migrate it to Drupal. It was an absolutely right choice to make. Given that, with Drupal comes a lot more benefits. Read more »

If you are familiar with Drupal Views, you might have come across a very nifty feature called exposed filters. If you expose one of the fields as a filter then views provides a widget and a search option, where the exposed field can be searched. There is good video to learn about filter here.

However, we needed to extend the functionality so all the fields of the content type are exposed as  ‘searchable’ fields, not just the exposed fields. If we expose every fields explicitly, then the views filter will create a textbox for each field, which is not pretty. So in our example, we wanted to search ‘Person’ content type. And if the user entered either the first name, last name, address, of any of the values for the fields in the Person content type, a result would be returned. Read more »

Drush is a powerful shell for Drupal. It can many developer tasks really easy to manage from the command line. If you are installing it on Mac OSX, there might be a step or two which you have to perform for Drush to work correctly.

If you have pear or wget on your machine, then the process would be straightforward as described on the Drush site. However, if you are manually downloading the Drush then:

1. Download and untar the Drush in a directory outside your Drupal. Read more »

Drupal 6 offered two ways to display a node - teaser and full mode. However, There might be custom display types required - e.g. RSS display, search result or even home page display. Drupal 7 offers Custom View Modes to achieve custom rendering of the nodes.

You can create new view modes very easily using code or a module like Entity view modes

I will provide an overview of the code required to create a new view mode and defining a new node.tpl to display the node in the newly defined mode Read more »

AHAH is a way to allow developers to add new form elements to an existing form (on a page) asynchronously, without reloading the page again. Please refer the detailed fapi on AHAH.

The main steps for creating an AHAH form are:

1. Attach the AHAH property to a form element. (Not all form elements support AHAH)

2. Declare a callback function which should be called 

3. Implement the callback function Read more »

SAP ES Workplace: An awesome site for understanding and testing all SAP delivered services:

SAP has a site called "ES Workplace" - Enterprise Services Workplace where all the ES delivered by SAP are consolidate in one place. The aim is to improve adoption of these services and for learning and testing purposes. Read more »

(Some familiarity with Amazon AWS is assumed.)