Over the last year Stanford Web Services has been building reusable modules to make website building faster and better, and then adding them to Stanford Sites. This post highlights Stanford BEAN Types.
What are BEANs (the non-legume, Drupal ones)?
For those who are unfamiliar, the BEAN module is for creating entities in Drupal that are similar to Drupal's core Blocks, but that can have fields like image or link in addition to the main text area. BEAN is an acronym that stands for Block Entities Aren't Nodes.
Like Drupal's content types, there can be multiple BEAN types. For instance you might have a Banner BEAN type or a Contact info BEAN type, with each having different fields and different display settings.
Stanford BEAN Types
Stanford BEAN types, now on Stanford Sites, provides default BEAN types that we have designed to help make beautiful websites faster! Contained in this feature are the Stanford Banner, Stanford Contact, Stanford Large Block, Stanford Postcard, and Stanford Social Media Connect BEANs.
Site administrators can create any number of these BEAN blocks and place them on their site's pages using the Block interface or the Context module.
Stanford Banner
This bean type provides a block that can be used for image banners. Users can add an image, credits, source information, and a caption.
Stanford Contact
This BEAN type provides a uniform and easy-to-edit contact block. Users can add an address, fax, phone number, email address, and a number of links. When placed using a Stanford theme end users will see a nicely formatted address block. This block type is great for adding to your footer area.
Example:
Stanford Large Block
This BEAN can be used for larger amounts of content than a traditional sidebar block. You can insert files and images into the body content. There is no header image on this block. When we need to add a large block of content in the main body area of a page, we use this block type.
Example:
Stanford Postcard
This is the flagship of the Stanford BEAN types module. It's the most flexible building block of the BEAN types. This block allows users a lot of flexibility as it has options for header image upload, more-links, and wysiwyg content. We use this BEAN type constantly in our development!
Why do we call it postcard? Because it's part image and part text.
Example:
Stanford Social Media Connect
This block provides a group of social media icons that link to your social media pages. Included in the options are: Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr. In conjunction with the Stanford themes, this block will have nicely formatted uniform icons for all of your social media links.
Example:
Sub Modules
Stanford BEAN Types Permissions
Stanford BEAN Type Permissions module provides some out of the box permissions. This module may be safely disabled and overridden through the permissions setting page.
We hope you enjoy this new module!
