Pres why entity_forms_italo_mairo_drupal_days_milano_8_may_2014

Milano - 8 Maggio @ 2014 - italomairo.com
WHY ENTITY FORMS?
The Case Study
Management & Subscription of
Editorial Plans
in the Fiera Milano Media Drupal
WebSite
www.fieramilanomedia.it

#DrupalDaysIT
Why Entityforms?
Every skilled Drupalis knows Webforms.
They have been widely used in the new institutional website of
Fiera Milano Media.
But the Entityform Module/Approach has been the most
effective for the implementation of sophisticated Management
(by Internal users) & Subscription (by External users) system
of Editorial Plans & Contents.
We will describe the logical approach and design, the structure of
Ajax EntityForms able to dynamically expose Editorial Content
(frontend) and the functional logic of subscriptions interfaces
(Views) and their contents’ management (backend).

#DrupalDaysIT
Entityform module (
http://drupal.org/project/entityform)
As its creator, Ted Bowman, further explained on Thu 10/25/2012 in the following article:
http://www.sixmiletech.com/content/why-entityforms-case-field-and-entity-based-survey-system-drupal
• Entityforms (differently from Webforms) are entities and use standard
Drupal fields.
• Entityform submissions themselves are field-able entities.
This has many advantages including being able to use virtually any field module
in Drupal. Now we can easily gather geographic information, reference site
content and include media references in your surveys and other forms.
• It also allows for simple integration with popular entity-aware modules.
With Entityforms thanks to the Entity API module, Rules and Views
have complete knowledge of the submission information just as they do
with the field values attached to other entities such as Nodes and Users. With
Webform, while possible, the same process is not as simple.
• Also for programmers the process of interacting with Entityforms is much
more familiar.. You can also use great helper classes such as the
EntityFieldQuery and Entity Metadata Wrappers to make dealing with
these entities much easier.

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Fiera Milano Media -
www.fieramilanomedia.it
Fiera Milano Media is the Fiera Milano group company specializing in the
specialized press, in B2B communication, management training and digital
services.
• 13 trade magazines
• 9 web portals
• 55 events / trade shows
• 120 training courses
• 2 B2B databases with
more than 700
thousand profiled users
• 2 outdoor venues*

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Fiera Milano Media website (www.fieramilanomedia.it)
has been developed (by me, on behalf of Crismaitalia srl) with Drupal 7 (since 2012)
let’s link in its bank-end (local link) ->

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Webforms Data Collection in Fiera Milano
Media
Webforms have been extensively used in the Fiera Milano
Media web site to collect different kinds of users
subscriptions:
http://fieramilanomedianew/it/admin/elenco_webforms
• Newsletter Subscription
• Free copy request
• Digital Magazine Subscription
• etc

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Each year, in advance, magazines’ editors and the company as a
whole define the so-called “editorial plans”: annual
programming, month by month numbers of different magazines
and the main issues to be treated within them.
The Editorial Plan of each Magazine is defined through:
Magazine Number / Month > Editorial Contents (1 - n)
This schedule is released outwards, so that an external user
(typically the company/press agency) may subscribe showing its
interest in contributing at editorial level.
Fiera Milano Media Editorial Plans
Subscriptions

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Subscriptions
Previous subscription method (and traditional), very complex:
External user:
• download pdf > print and fill > send back via email (and scan) or via fax
Fiera Milano Media Operator/Editor:
• Manual drafting of editorial plans, in pdf format
• Acquisition via fax/email of requests/subscriptions
• Manual archiving/management of requests, with transcript on
spreadsheet or other formats

#DrupalDaysIT
Subscriptions
New way of Editorial Plan Subscription, via Drupal 7:
External user:
• Cditorial content selection and details subscription/submit via web
Fiera Milano Media Operator/Editor:
• Creating and archiving plans and editorial content, year by year, via
the CMS backend
• Subscriptions and external user accounts management & storage,
year by year, via the CMS backend

#DrupalDaysIT
New Editorial Plans Subscriptions Approach &
Analysis
We had the following needs:
• create the relational Editorial Plans Structure (Content Types in Drupal) and
make the internal users able to input,create & manage these contents via CMS
backend
• create Forms able to expose dynamic and relational contents (Entity
Referenced) of the Editorial Plans Structure and get subscriptions from to
external users
• manage and expose (with Views or whatever) Subcriptions and sub details (like
Entities) strictly related to the Editorial Plans Contents (Entity Referenced)
Why Entity Forms above Webforms ?
All those task are:
• very hard (probably impossibile …) to be achieved with the Webform Module
• easy - logical (and quite natural) to be achieved with Entity Form Module

#DrupalDaysIT
Creation & Management of Editorial Plans
Structure
Creation of Drupal Content Types:
Drupal implementation
Magazine Editorial Plan (magazine, number,
month year, etc)
Editorial Contents (Title, Section, Description, etc.)
1
n (as entity references)
Creation of Drupal Management Relational Logics & Views,
throughout specific administration links/hook_menus, administration &
management views
Example Links/Views (local links):
http://fieramilanomedianew/it/elenco-piani-editoriali
http://fieramilanomedianew/it/content/energie-ambiente-oggi-n-16-novembre-2014
This allows the
Creation of an endless and multilingual Archive
of Editorial Plans
for every Magazine
its monthly issue/number
and its specific content types (title, section description)
for every year

#DrupalDaysIT
Creation of Entity-Form for Editorial Plans
Subscriptions
Drupal implementation
The Entity Form for Editorial Plans Subscriptions is created as a Field-
able Drupal Entity.
The Entity Form Module makes doing all this very easy, and very similar to the
creation of a Drupal Content Type.
Entity Forms Fields are just Drupal Fields.
In our case besides the usual and constant/text fields for collecting users
informations (Name, Company, Email, Address, etc.) we were able to expose
(and collect) specific and dynamic informations thorough entity reference
fields to the Editorial Plans’ specific Content Types.
is the implemented Entity Form structure (local link):
//fieramilanomedianew/admin/structure/entityform_types/manage/seleziona_piano_editoriale/

#DrupalDaysIT
In our specific case we had to expose dynamic content (specific
Editorial Contents) regarding the specific chosen Year &
Magazine Editorial,
in a sort of dependent Drop Down Menu Logic.
We needed to hardly ‘alter’ the Entity Form to achieve this,
injecting a lot of code to implement Ajax Behaviors, in the Drupal
compliant way > AJAX Forms in Drupal 7
The front end of the Entity-Form for Editorial Plans
Subscriptions
Our Drupal implementation with Ajax Forms
Here is our live Entity Form result (external link):
www.fieramilanomedia.it/sottoscrivi_piani_editoriali
… & Tableselect &
JQuery

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The collection & management of Editorial Plans
Subscriptions
Entity Forms Subscriptions management with Views and Rules
modules• Entity Form Subscriptions are Drupal Entities (such as Nodes are) easily
managed and exposed with Fields Displays Layouts (Full Content, Teaser, etc)
and Drupal Views.
• Once submitted by the Form, the data keeps the relation with the Entities
(Editorial Plans Content Types) referenced in the form, so that we are able to
extend of Editorial Plans Content Types’s Views with the related Subscriptions
collected by the Entity Form
(this is tricky with Webform Subscriptions > needs: webform_mysql_views
module)
• Besides that
the Entity Form and each Entity Form Subscription are exposed to the
Rules Module (through its Entityforms Notifications module, based on the
Entity Rules one), so that “events” might be triggered over Entity Forms
Submissions and their data.• We took great advantage of all this in the
Fiera Milano Media Editorial Plans Management
System
… in this way > (local link)

ITALO MAIRO
Engineer & Drupal
Delevoper
Personal Web Site:
www.italomairo.com
Email: info@italomairo.com
Username on drupal.org: itamair
LinkedIn:
http://it.linkedin.com/in/italomairo/
dealing with Digital Communication,
Web 2.0 & Web Gis 2.0 Opensource
Applications
Thank you …

Pres why entity_forms_italo_mairo_drupal_days_milano_8_may_2014

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