CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Adam - this seems very cool. How about posting a quick blog on civicrm.org to let more folks know about it! You can post one from:

http://civicrm.org/blog/6512

Hi Adam,

Great that you have published this.  +1 for Dave's suggestion of copying that post to the blog where it'll receive much more attention - it's a cool module.

Hi all,

This was a response I got from Piyush, who was also on the camp and requested a copy of the module through e-mail. It has some important information and it sounds like Piyush is working on this so I will try to direct him here as a space to keep the development moving.

Given the comments so far, I'm feeling that our original "Concept" needs quite a lot of work! It would be great if this is done collaboratively

Anyway here is the response from Piyush:

I spent most of yesterday getting it to work on a local development install and just about managed it.

I've noticed that most of it isn't very Drupal 'friendly' - it uses direct mysql database queries and functions, etc.

It however looks to be a great utility to use within CiviMail and definitely something I can use for one of my clients.

So I plan to start getting my hands dirty and learning how to code a Drupal module properly (finally!) as I would like this to be a good generic solution that others can use too.

Not sure how long this will take but will keep in you touch as to how it's going and will send you back the code. If you're happy releasing this into the community, we should eventually figure out where the module can be uploaded to. Don't think CiviCRM has a module/code repository for contributed modules yet but that would be ideal as it is specific to CiviCRM users. Otherwise I guess we can try and get it into the Drupal contrib cvs. We should also think of a better name for the module.

By the way - My idea for the name would be something like "CiviMail Insert Content" (bit long... but I prefer descriptive names!)

Thanks All!

Adam

Thanks for the update Piyush! I had used the insertnode module before but felt for this is was too rudimentary, however I didn't try the linktocontent which sounds very interesting. If it can do what our module was trying to do it would be great - let us know how you get on.

In the meantime is there any chance you could send your updated/cleaned up version of the module through so I can use it as an example with our developer He's totally new to Drupal hence the not so nice coding practices - it would be great if he could see what you did to learn for next time / future developments.

I will also then share the module with the community via a post on the blog - I think its better with a cleaned up version

Let us know how you get on. Many thanks!

Adam

Hey Adam,

As I said earlier I only started cleaning this up when you first sent it to me and as I'm still learning how to write Drupal modules, watch out for code not up to spec! You can download the modified module (which I've renamed to civimail_insertnode - hope you don't mind) at http://www.pecansolutions.com/sites/default/files/code/civimail_insertnode.zip.

However, instead of using this module, I found that using the linktocontent_node module from the dev version of linktocontent for fckeditor (at http://drupal.org/node/252938#comment-1588106) together with the linktonode fckeditor plugin from the fckeditor 6.x-2.0-beta1 release (at http://drupal.org/node/407376) with a few changes works just as well as having a custom module to insert node content for CiviMail, and also then allows inserting content into any fckeditor instance.

I used Chris Ivens' notes at http://civicrm.org/node/556 to let CiviCRM use the same fckeditor as installed in the Drupal site. This now allows the linktonode fckeditor plugin to work in all fckeditor windows i.e. both on Drupal nodes and on the CiviMail message editor page.

As I was running out of time, I changed the _linktocontent_node_get_nodes() function in the linktocontent_node.module to bring in the node teaser. I also changed the _addNodeToList() function in the linktonode fckeditor plugin functions.js file and also the Ok() function in the utils.js file. I also added some css to hide the teaser column in the linktonode plugin popup window.

I'm unfortunately not yet that good with javascript and Ajax – it would be better to get the node teaser value using a getdata() type callback function rather than fetching all the teasers in the first query as I currently do in the linktocontent_node module.  It would also be a good idea to create a separate contrib module for the linktocontent set of modules so that the original linktocontent_node module does not need to be modified.

Also it would be great to modify the linktonode fckeditor plugin to have some radio button options to choose between inserting a link to the node (which is the original intention of this plugin and already works), the node teaser or the full node body. This would then make this plugin really useful and flexible not just for CiviMail but for inserting any node content into any editor window. Maybe someone who understands this better can help get this plugin to this level of functionality.

Hi
I finally started taking a look at this after meeting Adam at the developer camp in London earlier this year. My first thought is to use a token approach in combination with Drupal relatedcontent module. That module allows you to associate one or more views with a particular content type so you can then manually select which nodes to include as related content. Using this in combination with a token in civimail, you could insert one token and that would be job done.

Shame to let some good ideas like the above go quiet - so thought I would poke to see if other progress or ideas or problems could be fed back in to the community