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.

Smooth upgrade to Drupal 4.7

April 20, 2006

One of the last sites I had to upgrade to Drupal 4.7 was waiting for the Mailhandler module. Today I noticed that the module had been updated yesterday and decided to give it a shot. It couldn't have been a smoother upgrade. I downloaded the Mailhandler module and installed it for just that site and ran the update script and things were quite smooth. The progress bar didn't display properly but otherwise things were smooth as silk and all the functional bits worked well.

Grass Stains for Drupal 4.7

April 4, 2006

I've worked recently on a port of the Grass Stains theme for Drupal 4.7. Though it is not quite perfect it seems to work well for most things and I don't have the time at the moment to track down the last few glitches. If anybody is inclined to pick it up and add anything more please do so. If not it will likely stay as-is for a while.

Drupal upgrade

April 2, 2006

With the recent Drupal 4.1 Release Candidate 1 I decided it was time to upgrade this site. I've been happily using the betas on other sites and it seems very close to ready for prime time. The longest part of the upgrade was working through the problems of changing collations in the MySQL database when upgrading from earlier versions of Drupal.

Drupal.org gets update

March 26, 2006

Drupal.org got an update today. It seems to work well but the ability to login using an ID from a site still running Drupal 4.6 is missing. So until this site gets updated I'll not be able to login/post over there.

Three years of Drupal

March 5, 2006

Today marks three years since I publicly started using Drupal (Version 4.1) to manage this website. In that time I've ended up creating d o z e n s of sites using this great tool. In my own web development experience it has replaced Userland Frontier and Zope which I had spent a lot of time with. There were a plethora of others that I've toyed with like the PHP-Nuke and PostNuke style programs that ultimately lacked the true flexibility of a first rate content management system. Today the project is headed towards a new release (4.7) which promises to be spectacular.

Once upon a time when I worked for a different firm they had just implemented a very expensive content management system from a major vendor. When I showed the implementers Drupal they shook their heads and said that it contained the taxonomy system that put it ahead of the product they'd just implemented. I'll be the first to say I think the implementation was a part of the problem with the expensive system. Too much politicking at the top and not enough project management in the trenches - but this was the most common state of affairs in that shop.

Grass Stain Theme for Drupal

February 20, 2006

I just applied for CVS access to Drupal so I don't have the ability to post yet. In the meantime there is a serviceable port of the Grass Stains theme to to Drupal posted. It still has rough edges and there will be cleanup before submitting to the CVS repository but for those eager to start playing with it and improving it here you go.

A new look

February 20, 2006

WIthin a couple of weeks we'll mark the passage of the three year mark for this site running on Drupal. It is easily the longest the site has been on a single content management system. Others included Clay Basket, Userland Frontier and Zope.

In honor of this and because Drupal needs some good new themes, I started working this afternoon on porting the excellent Grass Stains theme to a Drupal 4.6/4.7 theme. I found several themes at OpenWebDesigns.org that will lead to some more porting soon. First, however, will be a new look for the Nevada Boys State website.

Once I do a little more work on the theme and get CVS access for Drupal I'll be contributing the theme to the site. In the meantime if you want to work with it drop me a note and I'll send you the tar file.

Dynamic CSS

February 18, 2006

Jeff Robbins posts about dynamic CSS. The idea being creating a CSS in php where you can use variables such as changing colors, backgrounds etc. in the PHP. It also has potential for the ability to reduce the number of files necessary to serve a page.

In systems like Drupal where there is a system-wide style sheet as well as one created for each theme and some modules add their own as well. With all of these it means more connections required to download a single page. For many users this is not a huge deal. For those of us on satellite links it is a problem.

Google Analytics module for Drupal 4.7

February 13, 2006

I spent a little time last night with the Google Analytics module from Ixis. Mike's module works well for Drupal 4.6 but needed a couple of quick tweaks to make it work with the new forms API in Drupal 4.7.

The module, updated for 4.7, is attached below. Someday I need to get the whole CVS portion figured out to contribute to the main Drupal site, but I'm dreading how it will work over the evil satellite connection.

Blogtheme for Drupal 4.7

February 11, 2006

I've spent a while today trying to upgrade the Blog Theme module for Drupal to work with Drupal 4.7. Somehow I'm just not seeing the error. It is not throwing any errors so maybe I need to break it in order to track the variables more easily. Fixing Blog Theme is the last "must have" for upgrading this site to Drupal 4.7. A few more challenges remain for one more site.

Update: Persistence does pay. Attached below is a module for BlogTheme that seems to work with Drupal 4.7. The only other modification to the config is setting Taxonomy Theme to be called as a menu hook instead of init hook by changing taxonomy_theme_init () to taxonomy_theme_menu().

Update #2: This is odd. I'll have to work more tomorrow on what it means. If I put blog_theme.module into the modules directory it works fine. If it goes into the modules/blogtheme/blog_theme.module directory it doesn't work. It should but it doesn't.

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