We're happy to announce the launch of a new client project: Switzerland Global Enterprise.

Despite the successful partnership we have barely shed any light into the work we have done for this great organization. Formerly known as OSEC, the organization represents the interests of Switzerland's export industry, import program and in a third function manages the country's location promotion efforts. In order to streamline the public appearance of these units, the organization opted to rebrand.

From a technical point of view the trusted foundation of Drupal 6 only underwent minor changes, since the focus of this release lays on the necessary adjustments to meet the organization's new corporate design.

Since the page's initial release, a blog with enhanced community features, it has grown to handle 35,000 nodes in four different languages. In the meantime it has incorporated the organization's old web site in order to become their main presence on the world wide web. This makes Switzerland Global Enterprise the perfect show case to illustrate the versatility which Drupal possesses.

If you’re adding JavaScript to your custom module it is very easy and tempting to simply add it like this:

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
  alert(‘hot dog flavored water’);
});

Now this code works perfectly fine but what if your JavaScript needs to be executed on page load and after an AJAX request? Imagine you have a view that uses “Views Infinite Scroll” and you want add a CSS class to every result like this:

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
  $('.view-display-id-page .views-row').addClass('fancy-pants');
});

This will work for the results that are displayed initially but for all the results that are loaded by Infinite Scroll's AJAX call the class is not added. That’s where Drupal behaviors come in handy.  The behaviors will be executed on every request including AJAX requests, so let's do the equivalent of the code above but this time using this method:

Drupal.behaviors.infiniteScrollAddClass = {
  attach: function (context, settings) {
    $('.view-display-id-page .views-row').addClass('fancy-pants');
  }
};

I admit that was quick - so here are some explanations:

• infiniteScrollAddClass: This is your namespace and should be unique. For example, this is typically the name of your module, but it isn't mandatory.
• context: This is actually really really cool, on page load the context will contain the entire document and after an AJAX request will have all the newly loaded elements. This way you can treat content that is loaded in via AJAX differently than others.
• settings: This contains information passed on to JavaScript via PHP, it is similar to accessing it via Drupal.settings. For further comprehension I recommend this source.

There obviously are cases where some functionality should not be executed on every request. In such a case its great to use jQuery's .once() method. So let's say we want to give all the initially loaded results in our view an additional class, for something like this we would proceed like so:

Drupal.behaviors.infiniteScrollAddClass = {
  attach: function (context, settings) {
    // these are the elements loaded in first
    $('.view-display-id-page').once(function(){
      $(this).find('.views-row').addClass('i-was-here-first');
    });

    // everybody
    $('.view-display-id-page .views-row').addClass('fancy-pants');
  }
};

This will add the class “i-was-here-first” to all the view results present on page load, everybody else joining in via AJAX will just get the “fancy-pants” class.

So that’s a quick look at Drupal behaviors, if you haven’t used it do use it!

If you are looking for additional theoretical insight into this topic I can recommend these two sources for further reading:

• The Drupal JavaScript API (for Drupal 6 but explains it very well and mostly also applies to Drupal 7)
• Managing JavaScript in Drupal 7

While working on LikeMag, one of our most recent releases, we were confronted with a challenge: loading ads during a Drupal AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) call. This is how we solved it.

The issue

By definition synchronously loaded JavaScript can only add objects like files, content or ads to a page's structure until it is entirely rendered. An additional complexity that can occur while working with third-party advertising providers is that you can not control the performance of their infrastructure. Which means either you accept this risk or try finding a way to mitigate it. We went for the latter.

At this point it is important to stress that it is common practice for third party ads to use the document.write method which only works for the synchronous loading approach. To learn more about the synchronous and asynchronous loading of remote tags I suggest you read the article "synchronous vs. asynchronous tags - what’s the big deal?" on the krux blog. In our case however it became apparent that our solution had to include the asynchronous approach.

While researching possible solutions I found the following tools:

• Write Capture
• Ghostwriter
• Control JS
• Krux PostScribe

The issue with the the majority of them were, that active development or support wasn't visible, except for PostScribe. This solution offers the following features:

"Krux PostScribe enables the type of tag execution required by most ad formats in an easy-to-use-and-deploy format. It leverages innerHTML to ensure reliable, fast ad delivery."

"Unlike other innerHTML-based solutions (e.g., writeCapture, ControlJS, and OpenTag), Krux PostScribe seamlessly enables the “immediate writes” upon which most ad formats depend."

Which in plain English enables the quick rendering of the page to the user and allowing the ads to respond in their own time without reducing the user's experience.

How to use PostScribe

Download PostScribe directly from its github repository.

Include these files in your project:

/htmlParser/htmlParser.js
/postscribe.js

Here is a small example:

<div id="myAd"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $(function() {
    postscribe('#myAd', '<script src="remote.js"><\script>');
  });
</script>

Our use case

As mentioned in the introduction this solution stems from LikeMag which, besides utilizing PostScribe, is a responsive website and uses the Isotope library to arrange items over the screen automatically depending on the viewport.

Since there are no free lunches on the web, LikeMag has to monetize too and one of their models is built around ads. So in order to deliver the perfect balance between content and ads for every viewport, we had to find a way to render the perfect amount after the identification. And that is moment the where PostScribe comes into play.

Instead of injecting the ads right into the Drupal view and slowing down the loading of the rest of the page, we just print the standard items. In a next step the system iterates over the items and adds the appropriate amount of ad containers to the content with jQuery. (These containers can be addressed with PostScribe, because PostScribe works best when the DOM is ready.)

"But where is the AJAX you mentioned in the title?", I hear you cry. So let's talk about it right now. When we scroll down on LikeMag, which besides being responsive is a smart infinite scroll site too, new items will be loaded through an AJAX call. So here we can use PostScribe as we did before. The only thing that we have to check, is that we do not add ads to already "adified" content. In our case we can check if the view-item was already processed by Isotope.

See the code as an example:

Drupal.behaviors.ViewsLoadMore = { attach: function(context, settings){
      if ($(context).hasClass('view')) {
        $isotope = $('.view-id-articles .view-content');
        $isotope.isotope('insert', $('.view-id-articles .view-content .views-row:not(.isotope-item)'), function(){
          isotop_load_more_init(settings);
          Drupal.behaviors.advertisment.loadads()
        });
      } else if ($(context).find("html").length == 1){
        // If it contains html, it is the first behavior call.
        isotop_load_more_init(settings)
      }
   }
  }

loadads: function(){      $('.view-articles .views-row.views-row-ad').once('postscribe',function(){
        if(typeof(cachebuster) == "undefined"){var cachebuster = Math.floor(Math.random()*10000000000)}
        if(typeof(dcopt) == "undefined"){var dcopt = "dcopt=ist;"} else {var dcopt = ""}
        if(typeof(tile) == "undefined"){var tile = 1} else {tile++}
        var string = '<scr'+'ipt src="http://ad-emea.doubleclick.net/adj/likemag.ch/;' + dcopt + ';tile=' + tile + ';sz=300x250;ord=' + cachebuster + '?"></scr'+'ipt>';
        postscribe($(this), string);
      });
    }

As you can see we process only the newly loaded items from the Drupal view and exclude the already processed items.

With this solution we are very flexible to deliver the page content as fast as we can while not depending on the speed of an ad-provider.

LikeMag, our youngest client release, has hit the web and is ready to receive YOUR contribution. It is a platform for sharing the best and funniest social media content that you can find out there. Just post your gems on the LikeMag page and add to the commons of endless amusement, infinite scrolling functionality included.