Josh Huckabee

In this last episode of getting started with Exhibit and Drupal, we'll embellish the Exhibit we created in part 2 by adding some additional views, exploring the use of lenses and expressions, and adding another facet. Our final Exhibit can be seen here.

Adding Views to your Exhibit

So the first thing we'll do is add several additional views to our Exhibit. The tabular view is nice and provides some great functionality, but Exhibit provides some additional views that are great at visually enhancing the way your data is displayed. We'll start by adding a calendar view. To do this you'll need the following code pasted within your viewPanel:

<div ex:role="view"
      ex:viewClass="Calendar"
      ex:label="Calendar"
      ex:start=".field_date_value"
      ex:end=".field_date_value2"
      ex:eventLabel=".title"
      ex:formats="date { mode: short; 
                         show: date-time; 
                         template: 'MM/dd/yyyy' } 
                  item { title: expression(.title) }"></div>

Ok, now that we know a bit about Exhibit and how Drupal can help us create Exhibits, let's start by getting our Drupal data in Exhibit JSON format.

Setup

The setup I'm using for this tutorial includes a Drupal 6 installation with the following modules enabled: Exhibit, Views 2, CCK, Date, Location, and GMap. I'm only using CCK, Date, Location and GMap to create a custom Event node type with date and location fields. I've also added taxonomies to the Event node type for event type and tags. You can create your own node type and add whatever fields you would like. I'm using this setup to demonstrate the broadest possible uses of Exhibit. With this Event node type, we'll be able to create an Exhibit complete with Calendar, Timeline, Map, and Interactive Table displays. You can visit my playground here: http://d6demo.joshhuckabee.com

Create Exhibit JSON from your Views

In this multi-part tutorial I will show you how to create interactive Exhibit displays of you Drupal data using the Views, CCK, and Exhibit modules. I'll start with a brief overview of Exhibit and how it works, then move on to explain how to get your Drupal data in a format that Exhibit can use, and finally, I'll show you how to setup the Exhibit. If you're already familiar with how Exhibit works, you'll probably want to wait for part two of this series.

What is Exhibit?