Drupal Learning Journal 18. Field Permissions, Password Strength, Editable Grid

I have been slowly working on several sites and in the process discovered some useful modules.
Field Permissions “allows site administrators to set field-level permissions.”

• Why would you need such a thing? The idea is that certain fields could be viewed by certain roles only. E.g. I decided to add the distributors of the films I am listing at my Jewish Film Festivals site. However I am hoping to come up with a business model where this site can generate some revenue. So one of the benefits for paying members would be the access to the distributors. So I set it that the distributor info only shows up for people with the right role.
• Yes, I am aware that what I am gathering is freely available on the web, but I am putting a lot of time pulling this scattered information into one central location.
• The module has only a dev version for Drupal 7, but is working fine, i.e. there is no bug posted in its issue queue. The Drupal 6 version is solid.

Password Strength is a module that administrators can use to “restrict passwords to only be, for example, “high” strength.”

• I thought it was too inconvenient for potential users to of one of the site I was working on being forced to create a password that had to have all of these:
  – at least 6 characters
  – both upper and lowercase letters
  – numbers
  – punctuation
• With the help of the Password Strength module I could lower the minimum characters for password to four and set the number of rules the passwords have to comply with lower.
• The module exists only for Drupal 5 and 6.

An editable grid–where content of nodes and their fields are displayed in a table format with the content of each cell editable right there–would often come handy. I’ve seen something like that in Drupal so I thought it is possible with off-the-shelf modules. My first implementation is halfway successful. With the help of the Slickgrid module I have a table where if I click on a cell I get a pop-up layer where I can edit the content. Next time I will want something without the pop-up layer, so I could edit many cells at the same time. Slickgrid works fine (for Drupal 6), but was not what I was looking for. On the plus side it required the Beautytips module, which is a great way to add balloons to any content any where. That’s a good discovery, helpful for explanation or help features.