Alexander on Web Development

I need to construct a newsticker for Diálogo Digital. We have been re-redesigning our news site for about 8 weeks now (except for the web designer that prepared the plain HTML/CSS files) I am alone. Initially I felt inclined to use a community provided (contrib) module, but here were my options:

• http://drupal.org/project/newsticker It is built for Drupal 6, uses JQuery's serialscroll plugin, outputs the newsticker into a block. Does not use Drupal's node system.

• http://drupal.org/project/views_ticker Built for Drupal 5 only, so it wasn't really an option. Offers views integration. Could have peeked at the code to see how it made use of the Views API (something I have considered myself but haven't done yet). Just like the newsticker module, outputs contents in blocks.

So far for DD's redesign I have created a custom module called dd2_components that is acting sort of like a "support module" that creates all kinds of things that are I am not creating using a combination of cck + views. Whatever my module fetches from Drupal's databases it is made available to the theme by using the theme hook. I have a hook in place that calls 8 custom theming functions so far for site components like

• Latest items list or "lo ultimo"
• Advertisement blocks
• The news blocks visible on the re-designed site's front page
• The main slideshow on the front page

All these components get constructed by a single SQL query from the dd2_components module to the database. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that (if you know about this stuff) you must have said "that must be the Uber query string", but no. I am calling a stored procedure (which acting like a main sp in turn calls other stored procedures so the SQL is easier to read and edit). So in reality the SQL looks more like this:

Sweet isn't it? There I saved the server from passing literally hundreds of lines of SQL to the database server every time the page gets constructed. Again for the drupalers, no, I DON'T have any caching in place for the results. Yeah I know - tsk, tsk, tsk. But it's in the wish list anyways ;)

So anyways, after considering the two slideshows I mentioned, I think I am going with my own solution because:

• The newsticker module outputs it's content into a block.
• Although dd2_components outputs it's contents in blocks, like I say in the attached pseudocode, I don't want to output the contents into a block in this case.
• I think the space where the newsticker will go is too tight for outputting a block without creating a separate block-xxx tpl.php and stripping it of everything except my content.

So I want to output the content using a theming function, which in turn gets called directly by page-front.tpl.php and page.tpl.php.

Attached is the pseudocode of what I considered before I started coding. (I think that I am going to start doing this more frequently for technical recruitment purposes, and so I don't have to store those pesky note pads - which are very sensitive to water, natural disasters, fire, etc).

Notice: When writing pseudocode I write very fast, as the ideas were to escape. Don't expect anything beautiful =)

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