Nodereference Explorer | drupal.org

The overall purpose of the Nodereference Explorer module is to provide a comfortable and user-friendly way of referencing content. Content authors should be able to link internal arbitrary nodes, e. g. content types such as pages, stories, news, images etc., to each other. Typical use-cases are for instance:

• Reuse of assets, such as images, audio and video clips for display on other pages
• Providing a list of links to internal pages

This module is developed in scope of the OSCE 3.0 website and CMS relaunch (http://www.osce.org)
Foundation and motivation

The basic functionality of referencing nodes is provided by CCK. Its inbuilt nodereference widgets, i.e. the select list, option boxes or autocomplete, are rather simple and don't offer advanced search functionality in retrieving the desired content effectively. Rich widgets with a similiar approaches as the Nodereference Explorer are implemented by the modules Nodereference popup, Node Reference Views Select and CCK Node Reference ASM Select. They are supported by Drupal 5 whereas the Nodereference Explorer is based on Drupal 6.

The explorer widget is built on top of the Node Reference module. It simply enhances the autocomplete widget with a modal jQuery dialog (see demo screenshot) and a detailled node preview. The dialog supplies a content browser which displays the content items in various styles: table, grid (thumbnail), list or unformatted. An advanced filter form lets the user explore and search for content items which can be selected by a simple mouse click. The filtering options and the content displays are completely customizable as they heavily rely on Views.
Features

This widget is highly configurable and it focusses stronlgy on usability. The most important features are:

• Selectable view items for all view display plugins, like grid, table, list and unformatted
• Exposed view filter forms for content search/exploration
• Highly configurable jQuery dialog including custom theming
• Field preview (also for common autocomplete widget)
• Leveraging indirectly the power of views:
  • Multilinguality
  • Image/Imagefield/Imagecache compatiblity
  • Lightbox or thickbox support
  • ... and much more