Facebook's newsfeed feature introduced social network users to continuous updates of news about the goings-on in the lives of their friends and contacts. Activity aggregators have turned out to be a pretty useful feature for social networking sites, and can even be a little addictive when done right. Most sites that bill themselves as a social or professional network now have some kind of newsfeed, friend feed, lifestream or other feed.

The Activity module is your best bet if you want to aggregate activities from within your Drupal community. Its API is a little more complicated than similar modules like Activity Stream, but allows for a greater awareness of the context of activity items, so that their appearance can change depending on who is viewing them. Activity comes with seven contrib modules that cover most of the common activities on a community-based Drupal site (creating/editing nodes, adding/removing buddies, voting on content, etc.). This makes it very easy to get activity streams up and running on your site quickly.

I've just released version 1.0 of the Teleport module. Teleport is "QuickSilver for Drupal", but if you don't know what QuickSilver is, that's not going to tell you much. Basically, Teleport lets you quickly jump to a page on your Drupal site by typing in part of the path or the title. It saves me a ton of time when jumping around to administration pages that are nested two or three levels deep. See an example in the screencast.

Since the beta release, I've fixed a few bugs and added the ability to search path aliases. I thought that searching paths was important enough that it had to be included in a 1.0 release.

Trellon is one of the sponsors of the third annual DrupalCamp Toronto, which will take place on May 23rd and May 24th at the Faculty of Information Studies on the University of Toronto campus (map).

It's common practice for theme function writers to give every div a class, so that it can be targetted by CSS. For us, this is especially important in forms, since our clients often ask us to lay out forms in complicated ways.

This was a problem in Drupal 5 (and earlier). Although form elements had ids, so specific elements could be accessed from Javascript and CSS, they are all encased in wrapper divs with class "form-item". This means there's no easy way to lay out a specific form item.