Scuba: Drupal Style

First, the printing of logbook pages straight up sucks. The text is entirely too small, it’s not in the standard logbook page size, and other more minor issues. Second, the software runs on the computer desktop and I’d like to keep my logbook “in the cloud” to be able to access it from anywhere … even on dive sites.

I found a few websites and third-party dive log software applications that let me manipulate and convert my software’s format and post online with public or private URL’s. Even with doing that, it wasn’t good enough. The presentation of those websites was pretty basic and had limited features. Most only displayed the basics of the dive and I don’t think I found any that let you upload photos and/or videos as part of a dive log.

For this reason, I decided to begin the quest of building a scuba logbook module suite in Drupal 7. Why? Not only am I a big fan of Drupal, but it also allows other users to extend and build upon my work to add features that THEY WANT with very little effort.

As of this writing, the module suite is still in alpha stage, but the very basics of logging a dive are accounted for and working. Some of the design requirements that I set in the beginning, and are present in the alpha version, are:

• Multi-user support Each user on the Drupal site can have his/her own dive log.

• User-configurable measurements Each user can control whether his/her data is displayed in either metric or imperial units.

• Dive profile If a user dives with a computer and can download the data, they can enter that data to display a dive profile for the dive.

• Locations Using the Locations or other geospatial modules available for Drupal, dives can be mapped using Google Maps™ or OpenLayers.

• Feeds importing of data The Feeds module can be used to import CSV formatted dive data. Several import parsers are planned in the future to make importing dive data from different computers and applications more straight forward.

You can access the Scuba module in my Github repository.