Mark your calendar for Wednesday the 21st at 3pm: Greg Knaddison, Dave Reid, Derek Wright, Jennifer Hodgdon and I are doing a panel presentation on how to maintain and support a contrib module or theme. It will cover:

Community management: Enlisting help, finding maintainers and co-maintainers, handling abandoned projects, dealing with duplication, handling the issue queue.

Drupal project management: What's expected of a maintainer, code and release management.

Coding issues: Coding standards, documentation, namespacing, simpletest, internationalization.

Resources for maintainers.

If you're a maintainer or might become one, or want to start helping overburdened module maintainers by helping out with these responsibilities, come and hear about how to contribute to the community more effectively and efficiently.

Here's the link to the DCSF page. The session is Wednesday at 3pm in 304, which is "Phase2 Technology".

Materials and resources will be posted on the Contrib Development Best Practices Groups.drupal.org page.

The little-known #states feature has gone into Drupal 7, and it rocks.

Before you read on, try this dynamic form live at d7.drupalexamples.info. It's developed without using a line of javascript, just plain Form API.

Essentially, you can provide dynamic behavior in a form based on changes to other elements in the form. An easy example: Often you only need to collect information if a particular element is selected. If they select type=student, you don't have to require them to fill in a further "Employer" field.

The new #states example in the Examples module's Form Example shows how a dynamic form can work. You can try it out live as well at d7.drupalexamples.info.

The idea of #states is that you add a #states property to a form element that is supposed to change when some other form element changes. So if a form element is supposed to be shown or hidden, the #states property will be added on that element, not on the element that caused the change.

The #states property is a structured array of action => condition arrays. The action is 'visible' or 'checked' or 'required' or several other options. The condition is an associative array of 'jquery_selector' => array(value_statement). But mostly you can do it by copying and pasting examples. Much of the time the jquery selector can be ":input[name=field_name]" and the rest of the array can be cookbook from example code.

In the example, the 'tests_taken' field is only to be visible if the form-filler is a high school student:

So we set the action to 'visible' when the condition (our select called student_type is set to 'High School') is true.

That's basically all there is to it.

So when would you use #states as opposed to AJAX forms or a sprinkling of jquery?

• If your form actually changes under the hood based on user input, then you need to use AJAX forms. #states doesn't fundamentally change any of the elements, it just changes their presentation.
• If you don't change the form, but need a transformation that simple conditional logic can't do, you'll have to roll some jQuery.

For more detailed comments and possibilities, read the #states example.

Rob Loach, Kat Bailey and I will be presenting Drupal 7 AJAX and Javascript Monday, 3-4pm, in room 307.

Here are the basics:

• The new AJAX Framework
• AJAX forms, with a complete how-to and sample, easy to understand code.
• The fantastic new #states feature for dynamic forms.
• D7 Javascript changes from D6.
• Using Javascript Libraries.

We've made great strides in Drupal 7. Come and hear about it.

If you used AHAH in D6, you're probably afraid of AJAX forms. But if you never used #ahah, you'll walk out of the room feeling competent to try out #ajax. You can't believe how easy it is now.

The Examples for Developers Project aims to provide high-quality, well-documented API examples for a broad range of Drupal core functionality. You can download the code from the project page, view it on api.drupal.org, or experience it (for several of them) at drupalexamples.info.

Recently, we've added two new example suites:

• Drupal 7 Queue Example, (see the code on api.drupal.org or experience the UI on d7.drupalexamples.info). This Drupal 7 code should also be compatible with the D6 Drupal Queue module, which is a backport. Thanks, coltrane!
• Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 Menu Example. These examples use nearly every feature of the Menu API, and provide easy-to-access examples of tabs, placeholders, and many of the other fairly obscure features of the Menu API. See the code on api.drupal.org or experience the examples at drupalexamples.info.

Examples for Developers is a community project. Contributions are encouraged (just use the issue queue). If you find a problem, please submit an issue. If you want to fix a problem you find, please submit a patch. It will never be perfect, but if we tend it as a community resource, it should get better all the time.