Eric Lawrence: Designer, Developer

As part of a "homework assignment" for the Drupal Nebraska meetup group, we were to pick some of our favorite Drupal modules. I'm sure that I'm leaving a few out but here's a short list off the top of my head:

This module is an attempt to make it easier to theme the messages generated by Drupal's drupal_set_message() function. I've seen many well crafted Drupal themes where the themer overlooked the status messages - often just because they are fleeting and inconvenient to generate. This can lead to usability issues when users fail to notice messages.

If you've ever put together forms using actionscript/Flash you might have noticed that your form elements are automatically assigned a tab index much like a browser may do. This is great but the user feedback regarding focus is not quite as refined as html forms. Html forms give subtle but consistent cues communicating input element focus.

Flash does this, by default, with blocky yellow rectangles around the text or button. This behavior style can be overridden in actionscript just as it can be in html. This is a quick look at one approach.

The nifty thing about using object oriented actionscript in Flash is you build up all sorts of bits and pieces of plug-n-play code to use over and over. It's valuable to have that go-to function/object that you can re-use without thinking about it. The more you use actionscript, the bigger your personal tool belt gets. If you want to give your tool belt a boost, here are two great open source actionscript libraries that you can use to do that. They both have a wide range of well thought out packages to include and both are nicely documented.