Paragon Executive Services

Drupal Remote Dashboard

Last changed: 9 weeks 1 day ago

Are you a Drupal Developer and/or a system administrator for a number of Drupal installations? Then this module is for you!

What is Drupal Remote Dashboard (DRD)?

It helps you to monitor and maintain any number of Drupal installations on any number of different servers (one or more per server) with any number of hosted sites on each of those Drupal installations.

DRD functionality in detail

Server list

When going to http://www.example.com/admin/drd you get a list of all configured servers with their name, their URL, the SVN revision number of the current installation (SVN integration is optional) and a server toolbar.

Note: a server in this context is the equivalent of a Drupal installation. So if you have a Drupal 6 and a couple of Drupal 7 installations on one single hardware server, this is managed as 3 Drupal servers by DRD.

From the toolbar you can...

• Edit server configuration in DRD
• Delete the server from the DRD list
• Update server information (receive the status report)
• Update the list of domains
• Retrieve SVN status report
• Update SVN to head
• Get access to detailed information of the server's domains

You can manage Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 installations simultanously. The only thing you need is the DRD Server module installed on each of the domains you want to monitor and maintain.

Domain List

Opening the domain list for one of your servers by clicking on the triangle pointing to the right the list of hosted domains on that server opens up as well as detailed server information below the server list.

Above the domain list you'll see the domain list toolbar and the list of domains shows you the domain names, their URLs and a domain toolbar.

From the toolbar you can...

• Open the domain details (triangle on the left showing south)
• Update server information (receive the status report)
• Flush all Drupal caches on that domain
• Run cron on that domain
• Run update.php on that domain
• Show URL aliases for the main URL (triangle next top the URL showing south, only visible if aliases are available)

The same toolbar is the domain list toolbar above the domain list and it comes with the same icons as the domain toolbar. The difference is that a called function (e.g. "run cron") will be executed on all domains in the list at the same time by just one click.

Domain Details

The domain details currently display the latest messages and the domain status report with fully expanded links to execute the functions from within DRD.

Main Toolbars

Above the server list you can see some global toolbars and they provide this functionality:

• Toolbar
  • Add new server
    A form opens and you can enter the URL, the username and the password of the DRD user for a new user. Optionally also provide username and password of your SVN repository in case you want to update your Drupal installations from it.
• Update all servers
  • The list of functions is the same as for the server toolbars and if you click on one of its icons it executes the associated function of each server in the list, e.g. it updates the server info for each of the servers by just one click.
• Update all domains on all servers
  • The list of functions is the same as for the domain toolbars and if you click on one of its icons it executes the associated function of each domain on each server in the list, e.g. it run cron for each domain by just one click. This means you can do a full-day-job just within a few seconds.

How does it work (Requirements)?

Well, it's so simple. Just install the DRD module on the site which is your own system admin domain and set the permissions to the right user who should be able to access the Drupal Remote Dashboard.

Then, install the DRD Server module on each domain that should be monitored and maintained by the Drupal Remote Dashboard.

Create a user on each domain and grant that user the permission "administer site configuration" and assign a password. Note: the username and password on each domain of the same Drupal installation needs to be the same.

Then add the server to your server list in DRD and off you go. That's all.

DRD communicates via XMLRPC with each of the servers and each of the domains and protects your sites security by authenticating the user before taking any action on the domains or delivering any configuration information.

Future plans

We are planning a lot more features to come and hope that the Drupal community also picks up the idea and contributes to the DRD framework as we will be going to provide an extensible API to allow other developers to hook into DRD, very much like in Drush, see http://drupal.org/project/drush

For now, here is the list of items that are on top of our todo-list for the very near future:

• Make DRD a stable project and release 1.0
• Update and display update status to display available updates for all installed modules for each domain
• Function to create a new domain on one of the servers
• Provide some more links for each server and domain, e.g. shortcuts (from D7) and links to the ftp site and PHPMyAdmin (as examples)

eTracker for Drupal

Last changed: 40 weeks 6 days ago

eTracker, a bit like Google Analytics, reports web traffic to a webmaster and other authorized users. A big plus of eTracker is that the reporting is happening in real time and that even without installing anything other than some small code into the websites themselves.

Thanks to Drupal's modular approach it is quite simple to integrate eTracker dynamically into web pages and modify the parameters on the fly. Give it a try and let us know when you sign-up for an eTracker account, it's recognized as a donation to this project.

More details about eTracker can be found on eTracker's website (http://www.eTracker.de).

GMap Direction Extras

Last changed: 28 weeks 1 day ago

GMap_Direx (GMap Direction Extras) is a module that allows the request of directions
from Google's GMap service and stores all details about the direction in the Drupal
database for later view. All those directions are user specific and no route can be
saved more than once.

This module was driven by specific customer request and has been developed in a generic
form to be able to submit this to the open community. However, in the next few weeks it's
like to get changed fundamentally, so you should expect some important changes. Therefore
use with care in production sites for the time being.

After installation and configuration, just visit your account profile at
http://www.example.com/user/your_name and you'll fina a new tab called "My Directions"
or go there directly: http://www.example.com/user/your_user_id/gmap_direx. Here you
find two new tabs to either display all saved locations or add a new one. Everything
else should be self-explaining.

Requirements

Drupal 6 and the GMap module (including a free Google Map API key)

Installation

Install as usual, see http://drupal.org/node/70151 for further information.

Configuration

Configure Gmap_Direx in Administer >> Site configuration >> GMap Direction Extras

Enable GMap Direction Extras permissions in Administer >> User management >> Permissions

Pangora for Ubercart

Last changed: 40 weeks 1 day ago

This module allows you to easily and quickly integrate your Ubercart online-shop with Pangora, a Germany based service to list your products automatically on many different websites.

It currently comes with the following features:

1. Provide an automatically updated list of all your products in the required XML-format for Pangora to be downloaded by Pangora on a regular basis to integrate the given information and detail into their partner's listings. The URL of that XML-file/product-list is http://www.yourdomain.com/products.pangora.xml
2. It implements the Pangora Sales Tracking functionality by prodividing some detail to Pangora whenever an order status gets changed to 'completed'.

More details about Pangora can be found on Pangora's website (http://www.pangora.com).

Please do us a favour: Let us know when you've signed-up for a Pangora-Account as a donation for maintenance of this module. Thanks a lot in advance.

The module itself is hosted at Drupal. Please file your issues there and not here.

Quick Timetracking for Storm (Project Management)

Last changed: 20 weeks 4 days ago

Storm (http://drupal.org/project/storm) is a nice and handy project management suite for Drupal and it comes with organizations, projects, people, invoices, tasks, notes, and timetracking. This module extends the timetracking functionality by providing a simple block which displays a list on "in progress" projects. The user just selects one of those projects when he/she starts working on that project and as soon as he/she selects a different project, this module creates a records for timetracking and allows quick access to that record to fill in further details.

When you select a project to work on, you get the start time of that project displayed at the bottom of the block and when you click on that date you get to the project's page directly. As soon as you select another project to work on (or the top-most item "no billable work") then this module creates a timetracking node with all the relevant data. Nothing else needs to be done. This means, you don't loose any time when timetracking!.

Ofcourse, you can define a limit for minimum time spent on a project before it gets timetracked. By default this is 5 minutes and if you work on a project shorter than that, no timetracking record will be created.

Future Plans

It would be nice to extend this module nicely so that you get a list of tasks and tickets as well, so that you get quick access to them as well.

But before we start working on that we're waiting for some feedback from the community to understand what's good and bad about the current module design and where we should take it from here. So, please go ahead, download it, test it and let us know what you think.

Storm Dashboard (Project Management)

Last changed: 25 weeks 5 days ago

You know Storm? A great project management suite based on Drupal. If there was a downside it's the fact that it's all good old html and navigation is therefore a bit outdated. This is now history: Storm Dashboard is a very powerful yet simple to use dashboard which needs just one pageload and everything else is done dynamically by using JQuery. It's all themeable and it does not require any configuration.

Just download it, install it and have fun dashboarding - dynamically!