Drupal social publishing software

Drupal is a powerful content management system and framework that makes building powerful websites possible for mere mortals. Some of the posts here will be syndicated to Drupal planet.

Let's Get Together

The best is the enemy of the good. - Voltaire

One of the challenges facing the migration of a website from a collection of loosely gathered HTML and PDF files into a content management system is finding the balance between keeping the current site running and implementing the new site. In dreamland where information systems staffs and communications staffs are sitting about waiting for things to do there are plenty of helpers. In the real world it's not that simple.

This website started as a collection of pages in a single directory. Something like this:

/www/dept1.html
/www/dept1_hours.html
/www/dept1_additional_info.html
/www/dept1_special.html
/www/dept2.html
/www/hello.html
/www/home.html
/www/otherdepartment.html
/www/staff/staff_bio1.html
/www/staff/staff_bio2.html

As organizations are dynamic additional people come along and have some additional needs. In addition some departments have staff allocated who can do some HTML work and want to improve their sites. With time the directory grows to look more like:

/www/dept1/dept1.html
/www/dept1/dept1_hours.html
/www/dept1/dept1_additional_info.html
/www/dept1/dept1_special.html
/www/dept2.html
/www/hello.html
/www/home.html
/www/otherdepartment.html
/www/staff/staff_bio1.html
/www/staff/staff1/mypage.html
/www/staff/staff_bio2.html

Basically there are tons of files at the first level and a handful of second, third and fourth level directories. A little good fortune made this project easier. The existing site included a "include" directory. This is fortunate because Drupal has an include directory but it is called "includes". Read more about Let's Get Together

Submitted by Joshua Brauer on September 8, 2006 - 18:57

Journal of a redesign

With today's post I'm going to start profiling some hints and tricks for migrating an existing static website to a new site managed by a content management system. As it has been for the last few dozen projects I've worked on Drupal is the content management system of choice.

Background

The website in question started as a small collection of web pages. Early on (sometime before I got involved) the choice was made to use server-side includes to provide a semblance of control on the design. Over and over files were created and pages added. According to Google there are now roughly 2,600 entries for this site in their index.

In the early days of the site there was a dilemma. Since there was no content management system where people with information could make it available to users they had to send it to the webmasters. This quickly becomes a resource drag and the information suppliers are then told to put their information in PDF documents. With this history, the one-page PDF is more common than it should be. Much feared, the one-sentence PDF also makes frequent appearances.

The need for some automation drove the connection of several Microsoft Access databases and a small number of PHP scripts. With several processes left half-baked what should have been a help offered little assistance. Instead of posting a single-sentence PDF directly, the process grew into a series of e-mail the PDF, a webmaster posts the file and copies and pastes several entries into an Access database. Since that didn't cause enough problems there is then a step of FTPing the Access database to the server. The server uses ODBC connections to other data sources, but for this particular process they were never setup. Read more about Journal of a redesign

Submitted by Joshua Brauer on September 7, 2006 - 20:34

Drupal Code Freeze

September 1, 2006

My morning newsreader scan brought great news today. Drupal is in a code freeze for 5.0. It will hopefully mean that Drupal will have a 5.0 version out in time for Christmas. Among the changes are a revised administration area, improved multi-page forms, a great new installer and a personal favorite the ability to add roles to newly created users when they are created.

YoMoBlog.com suports Drupal

August 30, 2006

Dave Winer has setup a new service at YoMoBlog.com to make it easy to submit blog posts using PDA web-browsers. The great thing is it works with Drupal right out of the box.

I haven't caught the "mobile blogging" bug yet for public blogs, but it will be nice for private blogs where I need to add a note quickly on the run.

Update: It doesn't seem to get the category on the post all the time. I'm sure this will be worked out shortly but in the meantime there may be a need to check the category.

Variable number of fields in Drupal

August 10, 2006

The problem I'm currently working on is creating nodes in Drupal with a variable number of fields. For example I'd like to have an "officers" list for organizations they might have 1 or 5 or 50. I'd rather not hard code a certain number of fields as a maximum.

River of news

July 14, 2006

This post mentions Earthlink's new RSS news reader says "Until yesterday these were the only aggregators that worked this way." Well, that too is not quite correct. Drupal has for at least a few years included an aggregrator that works in the River of News format. Granted that Drupal's aggregrator doesn't have some of the other features for easily marking posts as read, but it's been doing river of news for a long time.

Comment Spam

July 7, 2006

A couple of days ago I upgraded to the latest version of Badbehavior to deal with comment spam. Later the same day a friend asked if I'd upgraded and I said yes, wondering why the question. Of course it turned out there was a new version out in the hours between my upgrade and his question. So it goes....So far Badbehavior 2 doesn't work with Drupal 4.7 (or any version for that matter). I've yet to put in any cycles trying to figure it out. Today I did downoad the Drupal spam module again and we'll give it a spin. Having been hit with comment spam the last few days it will be good to see if the spam module works. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

American Legion Nevada Boys' State Website

May 21, 2006

The American Legion Nevada Boys' State website has undergone a major revision. It was the last of the sites I manage to get the Drupal 4.7 upgrade. In addition this morning it got the wonderful CiviCRM. Still working through getting all the data moved into the new system and getting the legislature section of the website ready for the 60th legislative session of American Legion Nevada Boys' State.

Drupal turns 4.7

May 1, 2006

The Drupal project released Drupal 4.7 today. With the release many of the sites running Drupal from The Zimmer Twins to NASA and TheOnion.com will have access to many new features. Of course as fate would have it yesterday I worked on upgrading the stable of Drupal powered sites I run to the latest release candidate. The good news is that the release candidate process has been very smooth and upgrading from release candidate 4 to the final Drupal 4.7 should be a no-brainer.

Tools for bloggers

April 22, 2006

One of those small icons at the bottom of a web page on my morning commute through the web had a link to Performancing's website. The company puts out some interesting tools. Publish is the tool for blogging in Firefox. Dubbed the "full featured FREE Blog Editor" it lives up to its claim. While browsing through the web a press of the F8 key brings up a blog editor on the bottom half of the screen. It works well. There are some things that remain to be worked out like it doesn't support free tagging in Drupal and in the list of blog names blogs are listed by the user name - which doesn't work well for those of us who commonly use the same user name on different blogs. The big downside (and may be a deal killer for now) is the lack of spell checking.Performancing also has a metrics package that is interesting. After some more testing I'll have a post on that as well..